On 10/14/07, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip]
Instead, I would suggest having two edit boxes on the edit page -- one at the top for templates, and a second one for the main article text. The one at the top would be hidden by default, you would click a button to expand it.
The dividing line between the two would be determined heuristically on the server side.
A link would be provided to a non-JS version of the edit page, for compatibility. A user preference could also be added.
If we're going as far as two edit boxes and JS magic it would probably be better to adjust the edit window so that template parameters, (and probably ref tags) are hidden by JS and clicking on them or moving the cursor into them expands them.
It wouldn't be any more evil than the various syntax highlighting user-scripts that already exist.
The parsing required to identify templates is not at all hard. (I think it's the only aspect of our Wikitext parsing that is fairly easy to get right... :) )
We could go even further and have it go fetch a template configuration page for each template, and then automatically show all the fields, refuse to allow the user to completely remove a mandatory field, provide hover-over/pop up help about the various field types, and even basic input validation.
Is this line of thinking too kludgy?