Judging from my own experience I find it far less taxing to click on a button that says "bold" or "list" etc. than to learn (and often relearn) a special language that I need to mix in with the text in order to achieve the same thing. For me, to click on a button that says "list" is far more intuitive than adding some arbitrary characters in amongst my content. I also find it quite taxing looking at a sea of monospaced text intermixed with arbitrary characters that have nothing to do with my content.
Christiaan
On 11 Aug 2006, at 4:43 PM, Cyril Buttay wrote:
Hi all,
Just a quick question on this topic. Is it really the wiki syntax that people have difficulties to use (I mean the fact that you need to enter keywords and delimiter instead of clicking on "title1") or is it the semantic (not sure of the term) approach?
I mean, most word beginners only use direct formatting command (bold, font size), whereas wikipedia encourages a more advanced solution (well, not as much as it should be) where you define that something is a level 3 title, not the way it should be displayed.
Maybe I'm completely wrong (I come from the LaTeX world), but I wouldn't be surprised if the main difficulty for newcomers was this semantic approach more than the lack of GUI.
What do you think?
Cyril