[Wikitext-l] Visual editor & parser updates from August

[Sumana Harihareswara]

Here are some updates from the parser & visual editor front from the
last few weeks.

The wikitech-l list has had some relevant discussion around:

* a wiki object model:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-August/054499.html

* deprecated wikitext markup:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-August/054603.html

* the template system:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-August/054649.html

The visual editor folks are in a research and development phase,
exploring other systems and techniques (research) and prototyping a
proof of concept (development).

Trevor and Inez have been making substantial progress on the visual
editor.  Check out their work:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/tparscal
 and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/inez .

They spent part of August working on the transaction protocol/blocking
piece.  There are two possible models: 1. we save the entire doc at
every keystroke, 2. we build it as a series of events, and if we want to
undo, we can just reverse it.

Insert, move, & annotate are now reversible.  They are replacing the
current system with a transaction-based system, which will give us
better collaboration, & better undo for free as well.  But this is still
in research, very much in flux.

Neil is working on a demo of the Etherpad integration with MediaWiki,
but much of his time has been taken up with working on the Upload
Wizard, as you can see in
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author/neilk .  He
hopes to get it done ASAP.

We're interested in seeing how MediaWiki's trunk developers can reuse
existing Wikia code.  Wikia and Wikimedia Foundation have been
collaborating and sharing ideas, code, and designs.

Since chat and collaborative editing share auth requirements, Neil wrote
an Identity API extension for that.  I believe this is it:
/branches/extensions-realtime/IdentityApi