Steve VanSlyck wrote:
Take a look at what Wikipedia is currently doing with
the vector skin. I'm
having no problems, and, really, asking people to do their own markup is
not something I see as a great issue. It requries people to engage
mentally - at least somewhat - with what they're doing and forces them to
use the interface. Every car needs to run reliably, but every car does
not need automatic mirrors or A/C.
I'm not suggesting that luxuries and tools are not warranted, but only that
the users really do not require as much hand-holding as we think they do,
and if they're insisting on it for something which is really pretty basic
then I have to question why. I am a great believer in
tools-for-efficiencies, but I also believe that a little bit of work
never hurt nobody. Typing ''2,'' '''3,''' or
'''''5''''' single quotation
marks, or [one] or [[two]] brackets, or even <u>underscoring</u> one's
own text really isn't a big deal.
On tables I agree with you 100%, but for bold, underline, strikeout,
italics, and links, well, I think people can - and largely should - do it
themselves. I don't want to have to learn Dreamweaver simply to edit a
wiki page. And if we're not carefull that's exactly what we'll end up
with.
I have to disagree with you given my experience. In one government
department where MediaWiki was installed we saw the active user base
spike from about 1000 users to about 8000 users within a month of having
enabled FCKeditor. FCKeditor definitely has it's warts, but it very
closely matches the experience non-technical people have gotten used to
while using Word or WordPerfect. Leveraging skills people already have
cuts down on training costs and allows them to be productive almost
immediately.
Cheers,
Rob.
--
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Application and Templating Framework for PHP