On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 00:31, Aryeh Gregor <[email protected]> wrote: > Wiki syntax is too complicated for this to be feasible. It also > doesn't have a one-to-one mapping to HTML. It's been tried before, > but what you end up with is that it doesn't round-trip: if you open in > the WYSIWYG editor and save with no changes, it saves totally > different wikicode, confusing anyone who's using actual wikitext. The > only feasible solutions are to either drastically simplify wikitext, > or switch to WYSIWYG only, and those would both be very disruptive.
Another solution would be to identify a "simple" subset of wikitext for which the mapping to XHTML is one-to-one and refuse to work on anything else (i.e. revert to the standard editor). The rationale here is that a visual editor would (probably) be aimed at new editors, and they should probably avoid complicated syntax anyways. That's the approach we took on MeanEditor <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor>. In our experience, the biggest obstacle is to get the different browsers to reliably make the same changes to HTML. The editor interface is non-standard, and browsers sometimes disagree on encoding rules, escaping, choice of tags, etc. Anyways, there is a survey of existing approaches at <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor>. This might be useful to new editor developers, and if you find a cool idea it would be nice to contribute to the page. The usability project also did a survey last year: <http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environment_Survey/MediaWiki_Extensions/Results>. In the end, I think the FCKeditor developers did an amazing work, but I am still convinced that a simple (and hopefully reliable) HTML-based solution would have a purpose. Also, it's nice to be able to compare different designs. Bye, -- Jacopo _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
