[WikiEN-l] Why we need a good WYSIWYG editor

[David Gerard]

2010/1/4 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:

> I think that, fundamentally, "WYSIWYG" isn't the right model for
> Wikipedia or even wikis in general. What fits our model is "what you
> get is what you mean". We really shouldn't want most editors worrying
> too much about how the page looks because its important for readers
> that the look and feel be very consistent across the site and not
> change constantly reflecting the standards of tens of thousand of
> distinct authors.


You may think that a semantic markup system is just the ticket, but
people who casually write stuff almost universally pick presentational
markup and do the semantic bit in their heads, where it belongs.
Whatever number of decades it is of computer scientists and other
enthusiasts for semantic markup haven't changed this, which leads me
to suspect they won't.

Wikitext uses '' and ''' for emphasis purposes, not <cite> <address>
<quote> etc. Why is that?


- d.