- Disable markup (plain text) editing
- Allow visual editing to mangle plain text documents
- Make significant changes to what Wikitext is and can do
The reason the parser and visual editor projects are so hard is very much to do with these points.
If changes to the markup are at some point desirable, the work we are doing helps that greatly by giving non-markup-geeks a way to go about editing without being exposed to markup changes should they occur. The parser work, as Gabriel mentioned before, is also a critical part of evolving Wikitext (if that's ever desirable) because you could simply make changes to the serializer and parser and migrate a document automatically.
- Trevor
On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Gabriel Wicke
<wicke@wikidev.net> wrote:
> The concern I see being expressed, fundamentally, is "I have developed
> skills, practices, and efficiencies with current Wiki syntax. Is your
> new parser going to destroy my investments in learning? am I going to
> have to start over with this new system?"
>
> As I understand it, for the foreseeable future there will be a raw wiki
> syntax interface available. I hope contributors can be reassured on this
> point.
We are trying to provide an additional, easy way to edit the WikiText of
regular content pages. This should not interfere with diffs or otherwise
mess up existing WikiText. See many previous posts in this list for
technical detail on how we are trying to ensure this.
If WikiText was to be ever removed then there would need to be a very
good way to handle all of templates, parser functions and so on. Visual
programming does not seem to be as popular as some people expected it to
be in the 80s, so I won't hold my breath for markup to disappear any
time soon.
Gabriel