On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Magnus Manske <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 7:33 PM, Fred Bauder <[email protected]> > wrote: > >>> Beyond that let's flip the question the other way -- what do we *want* > >> out > >> of WYSIWYG editing, and can that tool provide it or what else do we > need? > > > > We want something simpler and easier to use. That is not what Wikia has. > > I could hardly stand trying it out for a few minutes. > > So, why not use my WYSIFTW approach? It will only "parse" the parts of > the wikitext that it can turn back, edited or unedited, into wikitext, > unaltered (including whitespace) if not manually changed. Some parts > may therefore stay as wikitext, but it's very rare (except lists, > which I didn't implement yet, but they look intuitive enough). > There's a lot I like about the WYSIFTW tool: * replacing the section edits inline is kinda nice * folding of extensions and templates is intelligent and allows you to edit them easily (unlike Wikia's which drops in opaque placeholders, currently requiring you to switch the *entire* section to source mode to change them at all) -- some infoboxes for instance show up as basically editable tables of parameter pairs, which is pretty workable! * popup menus on links, images, etc provide access to detail controls without cluttering up their regular view I've added a side-by-side view of a popular article (top of [[w:Barack Obama]]) with its WYSIFTW editing view and the Wikia editor (which just gives up and shows source) at: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikitext.next#Problems There are though cases where WYSIFTW gets confused, such as a <ref> with multi-line contents -- it doesn't get that the lists, templates etc are inside the ref rather than outside, which messes up the folding. These sorts of things are why I think it'd be a win to use a common wikitext->AST parser for both rendering and editing tasks: if they're consistent we eliminate a lot of such odd edge cases. It could also make it much easier to do fine-grained editing; instead of invoking the editor on an entire section at a time, we could click straight into a paragraph, table, reference, etc, knowing that the editor and the renderer both are dividing the page up the same way. -- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
