On 18/01/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
if we need 80%+ of support for everything, how can we ever hope to make changes to the fundamentals, like getting rid of wiki syntax in favor of rich text editing, or implementing a better discussion system?
The issue there isn't community support, it's development. There is work being done on the parser that might make implementing WYSIWYG possible in the future, but I wouldn't expect it any time soon.
It's actually progressing :-) See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec/ANTLR - advantage of [[ANTLR]] is that describing MediaWiki wikitext in it appears mathematically possible (it isn't possible in EBNF), disadvantage is that the compiled parser is presently slooow and it can't replace the present parser without providing almost complete compatibility as fast or faster. This work is mostly being done by Steve Bennett; discussion happens on wikitext-l.
(We presently don't have a defined syntax at all - wikitext is quite literally defined as "whatever the parser does." But we need a defined syntax so that a WYSIWYG editor not only knows what it's writing, but what it's reading. And once we have a defined syntax, 100% compliant reimplementations of the parser in any programming language are possible. Anyone who wants to further this work, please feel free to (a) work on the ANTLR grammar (b) make the PHP rendered by ANTLR faster ;-) )
Once the feature is implemented, the community can decide whether to use it or not, but it's really a personal choice, so I imagine the developers would just implement it on Wikimedia sites unilaterally and let individuals use it if they like.
A good WYSIWYG interface option (where a user can use rich text or raw wikitext) would be the sort of thing to include in MediaWiki by default, I think. Rich text by default, raw wikitext as a user preference. Something like FCKeditor could do a *perfect* job if it only had a defined grammar to work from and to.
- d.