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

[Thomas Dalton]

2010/1/4 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> 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.

It all comes down to what you expect to be done with the content. If
it is just for viewing on the internet in a standard web browser, then
you want people to just concentrate on presentation and ignore
semantics. If you expect the content to be used more widely then the
other way around is more useful since, if you have the semantic
information, you can work out what the presentation should be like for
any medium or you can even process the information contained in the
content automatically and output something else entirely. Doing that
with just presentational information involves a lot of guesswork and
complicated parsing.