* brion(a)wikimedia.org [Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:35:16 +0000]:
Full wysiwyg has lots of fun problems, mainly because
the strategy of
translating between wiki markup and HTML leads to a lot of edge cases
which
ends up breaking things. Folks have been trying to tackle it for years
and
still aren't quite there; Wikia's current work with FCKeditor is
pretty
good but still has a lot of things that just don't
work... conversion
can
be lossy and the handling of templates, tables, extensions, etc would
lead
to most pages having to be edited in source mode at exactly the times
you
least want to touch the raw markup.
Instead, we've got the Usability project focusing on things we think
we
can really deliver, providing most of what's
actually useful about a
wysiwyg environment:
* modernizing the look, feel, and interaction model (more live, less
post-and-wait)
* getting the scariest parts of the markup out of your face
* providing humane user interfaces for tasks like finding links and
categories, uploading/picking/sizing images, filling out templates,
creating and editing tables
* context-aware editing (an editor that knows what section you're in,
where this link points to and if it exists, what fields this template
needs, etc)
I hope that wikitext syntax highlighting fits to some of these tasks. It
was mentioned in the third step of Usability Initiative site.
Dmitriy