On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru wrote:
- Tei oscar.vives@gmail.com [Sat, 26 Sep 2009 02:40:06 +0200]:
Hello.
Heres a screenshot of me editing the wikipedia:
http://zerror.com/unorganized/crap/nogoodenough.png
All the webmasters on this mail list will spot the problem with this text in 1 second: is unreadable. The space betwen lines, the lines length, the complexity of the text... Is really hard to read. A HTML textarea can server for writting emails, and simple text, but on this image fail short. Textareas are not designed for this, or are not good enough.
How a webmaster can make that text better? well.. you need to stop using the HTML textarea widget. And emulate it with divs, css and javascript. You need to colorize the code. Nowdays *ALL* good code editors colorize code. If our code editor don't colorize the wiki sintax, or don't even try, our editor is bad. I could be wrong, but maybe [[links]] and {{templates}} can be detected and colorized. And since you are emulating a editor, you can add a bit of usefull beaviors: make so some areas are read only, so the cursor skip then. Oh.. and you can make the whole think AJAXified,.. so wen you click [Edit section] this section become editable, and wen you "save", the edit view send, and is replaced by the result. Why would you want to people bounce here and there to post stuff in 2009?
He... our computers support 24 M colors, and we are showing text with 2 colors? pfff....
I am very much supporting you! Both code colorizing and AJAX editing preview. And maybe a links "code completion" - when yuu press [[ it will open an JS-generated dialog with drop-down title search list. It's not that wikitext is too hard (with the huge exception of templates) but the editor is very much restricted.. Though templates surely aren't nice and it's probably is better to keep them separate and XML-ize them. Dmitriy
For templates you can use a "Code beatiffier", that unofuscate the code. Templates can be hard to write, but theres no reason to let then be hard to read. Maybe MW already do that..
Here is a example using another template language (bbcode):
[uRL]lalala[/URL] => [url]lalala[/url]
[quote=Dan]blabla bla bla[/img] =>
[quote= Dani ] bla bla bla [/quote]
I know that this maybe is a bad idea, If this may cause other problems, and theres one million others things that are worth our time :-I
A serverside "Code beatifier" can also helps a clientside colorizer. He can massage the template code first, and be smarter than the colorizers and prevent problems before hit the colorizer. A code beafifier can be implemented in a incremental way, the first version can "just" lowercase all letter. The colorizer can also be implemented in a incremental way, starting colorizing simple stuff. If a colorizing or a beatifier become a problem, can be deactivated, and things will continue smoothly.