MediaWiki is not low-tech. MediaWiki is one of the most advanced wiki engine, if not the most advanced in the world. I am not a web programmer...but.... What I think you're calling for need some javascripts. It might be really difficult to get it look right in every browser, especially browsers like IE. Anyway, options are bad. It would be a bad idea to have many options. It may allow for more bugs and make it harder for programmers and users in general. The last thing MediaWIki need is tons of bugs interfering with the operation of Wikimedia sites. On 1/6/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino(a)gmail.com> wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Virgil Ierubino wrote: [snip] [snip] I'd love to see this, but it's somewhat more difficult for MediaWiki than for something like flickr or facebook where you're editing tiny individual data fields like titles or comments. The level of edit addressability we have currently is at the section level (which currently runs you to another page rather than in-place but it's still a huge improvement over searching through a 100kb article-zilla). Even section editing, with the big easily-spotted section lines in the source code, have has its share of bugs; it took a year or two to shake most of them out. Individual paragraphs, table cells, etc would be an even nicer fine-grained level to do inline editing on, but this requires having a reliable way to associate parts of rendered output with the parts of source code which created them. Not impossible, but fraught with difficulty in edge cases due to our funky syntax, embedded HTML, template transclusions, conditional formatting, etc. It's really not a question of accepting it as an idea; section editing already *is that* at the first level. Rather, moving it to more finely-addressable parts of text will likely end up waiting on the much-fabled rewrite of the parser in order to accomplish it reliably. And that's not necessarily trivial; the parser needs to maintain a pretty good degree of compatibility with our millions of articles, *and* fix a bunch of problems, *and* make it easier to do these future sorts of things. Most effort currently is going to backend changes, performance/scalability/reliabilty work, bugfixes and maintenance, localization and user account support improvements, and simpler frontend/UI tweaks as we try to get some longstanding 'big issues' done and bring new volunteer developers up to speed. What might more realistically happen in the near term is making section editing work 'inline' more cleanly, with AJAXy goodness. This is hard to guarantee (due to section boundaries being potentially in strange places), but it might be possible to make it work mostly reliably, perhaps falling back to separate page loads in unclean cases. If you or someone you know wants to work on this, hop on over to wikitech-l and introduce yourself there and in the #mediawiki channel on irc.freenode.net. Rather, it should just degrade gracefully. - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)