Jan Paul Posma wrote:
Hello everyone,
As this is my first post to the mailing list, let me introduce myself shortly. My name is Jan Paul Posma, and I'm a 20 year old Computer Science student from the Netherlands. I was introduced to MediaWiki by Roan Kattouw, contractor for the Usability Initiative, who also happens to be a friend of mine. :-)
The reason for mailing to the list is the research I'll be conducting this year: building a new editor for MediaWiki. Now I guess this has been discussed over and over again, but this is a bit different. Instead of building a true WYSIWYG editor, I'm proposing to build an editor that's based on adding extra markup to the original, rendered page. This extra markup provides the ability to edit these segments. With this approach, it's possible to slowly enable editing for different elements. First, we can enable editing for "simple" sentences (thus the title sentence-level editing). "Simple" in this context means: without most wikicodes. I.e. only links are allowed, and perhaps bold and italic. This editor can be extended step by step to include other elements, such as references, images, tem plates, lists, tables, etc.
The last few weeks I've worked on some prototypes to illustrate this idea. You can find the most advanced prototype here: http://janpaulposma.nl/sle/prototype/prototype3.html The full project proposal and prototypes can be found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:JanPaul123/Sentence-level_editing
Right now I'm not looking for anything in specific, just whether or not you think this is a good idea, technically feasible, etc. If you have suggestions of any kind I'll be happy to hear them!
Thanks for your time! Regards, Jan Paul Posma
Interesting. I find the switch to 3row textarea from content a little jarring. A further developed version could make use of contentEditable to provide the same editing ability but without the negative side effects of the textarea. This could either be done as a actual lightweight wysiwyg -- floating undo, bold, italic, link/unlink buttons (being sure that when the user instinctively types [[internal link]] it turns into a link -- Wikia failed there). Or converting the simple content back to WikiText and showing the syntax ([[, '', etc...) inline, with a floating cancel and preview button just using contentEditable as a textarea replacement that doesn't disrupt the page flow as much.
If you do start to get into the contentEditable stuff later, be sure to try to contact me about it. I was working on a company project that could really have used a good inline wysiwyg editor, but I found all the wysiwyg editors out there lacking. They don't support contentEditable, they don't let you detach the toolbar from the editor (or better, give you an api and let you build the toolbar yourself), and they're such a horrid mess of bloated code I can't for the life of me find a way to extract the components that focus on cleaning up the mess the browsers make of the html and abstracting the wisiwyg api. And the browsers make a mess of things. So while I've had to make due with a workaround since we haven't launched yet, I've been hoping to eventually finish creating a MIT or MIT/GPL licensed ContentEditable library that'll abstract the basic wysiwyg mess that every editor seams to be reinventing and make rolling your own custom wysiwyg editor easier. Depending on what state we're at whenever you do get to that, we could collaborate on that, or I could probably spin it as a small contract or sponsorship for an open-source project we could use which would also be useful in your project and for other projects, if we're already launched. Or, perhaps enough time might elapse that we already hired someone to develop the library and left it open for people to freely use.