Grey all the things!
This sounds like an excellent project. I don't use syntax
highlighting, because it's complicated and ends up generally
*highlighting* the markup rather than making the content stand out.
But something simple like this, intended to separate markup from
content but keeping the content in the foreground... that's
potentially very appealing.
Looking forward to seeing how it turns out!
-Sage
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi everyone,
Dmitry, Monte, James, Vibha and I just met to discuss where to go with
syntax highlighting in the apps.
For a variety of technical reasons, implementing VisualEditor in the apps is
a gigantic undertaking. The Mobile Apps team left wondering whether there
are lower-hanging fruit that we can run with in the meantime. So we're
looking at syntax highlighting for wikitext to make it easier for users to
understand.
Dmitry has a working prototype (example screenshot). On discussing this
prototype, we were wary that while multi-coloured highlighting makes a lot
of sense for programmers it may not make sense for newer users who aren't
programmers, and may actually have the opposite of intended effect of making
wikitext more scary. Oops!
The way we're going to proceed is by changing the colour of all the
highlighting to grey. That way, the actual content in the wikitext is
brought to the foreground. The exception will be wikilinks; the text will be
black, but the brackets will be grey. Hopefully this will help users make
the association between the wikitext and the reader experience more
apparent. We need to choose the right colour such that the text doesn't look
disabled and disincline people from touching it if they want to, but we can
do that!
Since this is a side-project and potentially could make the experience a lot
worse if we do it wrong, this is just going to be pushed to the Wikipedia
Beta app on Android, and we'll analyse the data. We are only going to push
this to production if the data strongly supports our hypothesis (i.e. the
bounce rate on the edit screen is significantly reduced). If the data does
not support this, or is inconclusive, we'll look at other ways to test this
hypothesis.
Special thanks to James for offering his editing domain knowledge to us for
this meeting. :-)
Let me know if there any questions!
Thanks,
Dan
tl;dr: EVERYTHING GREY
--
Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation
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