On Apr 29, 2007, at 6:10 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 29/04/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The problem with WYSIWYG is that it goes against the concept of separating content and presentation.
Exactly. How does a person "see" what a blind wikipedian's text reader is going to say? :)
There are lots of different ways of displaying the same wikitext (see all the different skins, but that's only the beginning of what is theoretically possible), WYSIWYG encourages people to write stuff that only looks right in the skin that's used on the edit page. Writing in code encourages people to just write the content and let the skin worry about the presentation, which is generally preferable.
That's a sweet thought, but in practice it puts people off writing at all. By the way, is '' and ''' in the virtuous Wiki markup content or presentation?
Content. A text synthesizer program may take those tags and use a higher pitched voice, louder volume, etc. A web page version of that same content could take that tags and use them to change text colors, fonts, convert to ALLCAPS, etc. Or, alternately, ignore them entirely.
I certainly will concur that not having WYSIWYG *does* turn off a certain segment of the population, a segment which is deeply ingrained with the idea that they can make a page look "just right", by manually playing with colors, fonts, line breaks, widows & orphans, kerning, ligatures, etc. (the list is quite long, I know this because I come from DTP, where designers obsess over such things), but I think working towards that goal might distract us from making an encyclopedia for everybody, not just "an encyclopedia that looks/sounds exactly the way Ronald Chmara wanted it to look/sound for the pages he has edited, on the output targets he tested".
My personal idea of how the web-page should look is certainly an opinion, but with all the content debates we already have, I'm not sure we should extend additional presentation debates onto all of our pages as well (beyond what we already have). As it already stands, I have been involved in discussions over template order and alignment, picture order and alignment, etc., usually with personalities who are using heavily hand-tweaked User: pages, which of course, are completely non-portable for the blind, hard to translate for RTL, etc.
I think it's good to have a certain amount of presentation-focused folks working on the project, but I think it would be bad to extend that level of presentation control into to a per-edit basis.
-Ronabop