On Apr 27, 2004, at 07:56, David Friedland wrote: <div> tags are *also* bad, as are <font> tags. They're already there, though, and asking for something to be *added* and asking for something to be *removed* are different types of requests. The idea that a <span> with an inline style is "better" than <font> however is ludicrous; they are of precisely identical complexity (they must specify the same information, though using a different syntax) and equally lack semantic value. <span>'s only theoretical value is in creating semantically meaningful pseudo-tags via class specifications, something which is only useful if you also control the global style sheet. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brion Vibber &lt;brion(a)pobox.com&gt; writes: Even withot control users can override upstream settings using "!important" (IIRC). Some believe in semantic markup, others do not. Unfortunately, the WP suffers by the re-inventing wheels syndrom (instead of switching to XML/SGML now). -- | ,__o | _-\_<, http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | (*)/'(*)

Tim Starling wrote: I agree with this completely. Now, obviously we should be very careful about falling into any "reinventing the wheel" syndromes, or any "not invented here" syndromes, etc. But wiki markup serves a very different function from HTML or XML. --Jimbo

HDM> To me, wiki markup is just another editor in front of the HDM> real content. I expect to see a wysiwyg editor one day as HDM> well, and I expect to see the contents stored in XML for ease HDM> of access and because databases will offer us more features HDM> that way. I think one of the main principles of wiki is making wiki pages easily editable by anyone. Pages full of XML or HTML markup don't meet this requirement. I think a WYSIWYG editor* should be part of MediaWiki 2.0. There's some discussion of the problems with it here: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor The main problem is that in-browser WYSIWYG editors produce HTML, which would mess things up for people who must or prefer to work with Wiki markup. We'd need to parse the HTML produced by WYSIWYG editors back into wiki markup for storage. I think Magnus's recent HTML-to-wiki converter may be a big step to making this work. ~ESP * and an SVG whiteboard, too. -- Evan Prodromou &lt;evan(a)wikitravel.org&gt; Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/ The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide

Me> The main problem is that in-browser WYSIWYG editors produce Me> HTML, RN> Or program a WYSIWYG editor that produces Wiki markup. That's possible, but the current round of in-browser editors don't let you switch around the markup produced. They make HTML, period. RN> Or introduce Mishoo to Wikipedia and make him turn his RN> HTMLArea into a WikiArea: RN> http://dynarch.com/mishoo/htmlarea.epl HtmlArea is one of my favorites, since it smoothes over the differences between Mozilla's and IE's in-browser editors. I think the newer epoZ does a good job, too. There's a lot of ways this could work; I'm thinking it's long-term for now, though. ~ESP -- Evan Prodromou &lt;evan(a)wikitravel.org&gt; Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/ The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide