On 8/13/06, Edward Z. Yang edwardzyang@thewritingpot.com wrote:
If we make a WYSIWIG editor, I wouldn't give users a box to pick colors with. I probably wouldn't let them change font either (though switching to monospace is acceptable) or let them change font size. If they want to do that, let them switch to HTML mode and write the HTML themselves.
I agree - a wysiwyg editor that guides people to using standard markup would be very useful (ie, provide easy access to h1,h2,h3,etc. and provide no or non-obvious access to <font size=34>). Providing some sort of "black box" interface to templates would also be useful - that way people can easily add and edit the fields of templates in pages, but couldn't readily create more (it seems reasonable to expect a certain level of "more advanced" knowledge from people doing that).
The idea would be to make it so that if you sit down at the interface and click randomly for a while, you'll end up with a page that largely conforms to the wikipedia notions of style, even if it's non-sensical in terms of content.
Maybe all that's needed here is for someone to spend a week or two hacking on something like fckeditor to provide a suitably trimmed down "mediawiki oriented" version...
(Then again - as this message reflects I prefer basic HTML to wiki syntax; it's a bit more complex but tremendously simpler to parse and work with, and it's much easier therefore to get nice GUI stuff going around it.)