2011/1/4 Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com:
"WYSIWYG? WSYIWTF!"
Nice :-)
Update : WYSIFTW now with auto-collapsed references!
This is a cool demo, thanks for making and sharing it. It's obviously very buggy, but I think it's the first gadget that actually tries to create a rich-text editing experience directly on WP.
Within the usability initiative in the last year, the team focused on incremental enhancements to the current editing interface. If you haven't seen it, sandbox 6 of the usability prototypes is worth playing with: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/s-6/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=edit
It has both the dynamic table of contents, template collapsing, and a simplified tab view for edit/preview. The first two changes depend on changing the standard <textarea> to a contentEditable <iframe>, which introduces many of the same challenges that manifest as bugs in your WYSIWTF implementation. For example, copy and paste behavior across collapsed elements (as well as properly filtering allowed/disallowed content from paste data) is very hard to properly control across browsers. This massive added complexity and associated bugginess is the key reason why we haven't deployed these changes yet. The other reason is that our usability research has shown that collapsing elements can in fact increase initial newbie confusion as it becomes harder to make a direct match between the two representation modes (Ctrl+F for something you're trying to change no longer works).
There's an internal debate whether the <iframe> editor is at all a good long-term technology foundation to build on, or whether it would be wiser to adopt the Google approach of implementing a new editing surface in JavaScript (see http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/whats-different-about-new-google-docs... ).
The team is currently focused on finalizing the new ResourceLoader, which will generally make our front-end code more manageable, as well as finishing up phase 2 of the article feedback pilot (the little rating widget showing up on some articles) and ironing out bugs in the new upload wizard. But as we start into 2011, I'm hopeful that we can come up with a good development and staging plan for immediate improvements to the editing interface, as well as a longer term re-architecting towards rich-text editing which ideally allows for incremental benefits to be deployed to WMF projects.