On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 04:31:13PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
Jay, with all due respect, you're a programmer.
But I'm not. I hate writing code. That's what coders are for.
I'm primarily an analyst/designer, and that's what I've done for the last 20 years. The last year or so, to, I suspect, everyone's surprise, I've done helpdesk. Quite successfully. So I'm not at all unequipped to spend extensive time talking to non-computer-savvy users.
You're comfortablewith codes and so on. You'd probably be fairly comfortable with HTML too. You're probably also comfortable with command lines. Most people are not. It doesn't matter how simple you make it--many people are going to be put off by markup of any kind. I know many such people: anything resembling codes makes them instantly uncomfortable. "Screw them" is not a productive answer.
And indeed, it's not the answer I'd give *them*.
The answer I'd give *them* is the one I gave Christiaan *first*, and which ties directly into your next comment:
As for the problem at hand: quite simply, a WYSIWYG editor that implements all of our wikisyntax is totally impossible. It's way, way too complicated to implement smoothly in Javascript. But you know, the entire *point* of using wikisyntax rather than HTML is to make editing *easier*. If it stands in the way of creating an easier-to-use interface, don't you think it's outlived its usefulness?
If indeed it does, yes.
But the data is completely anecdotal: we have people who complain about it. Great. But we have *hundreds of thousands* of editors who have created, literally, millions of pages on Wikipedia.
So clearly, it's not unusable.
So how about this. Design a WYSIWYG editor that works with cleaned HTML, plus whatever syntaxes aren't replicable in HTML. Make sure this editor is high-quality, and then make it the default editor. Then, anytime someone requests a section or page, just convert all the wikisyntax (tables, bold, italics, headers, etc.) into HTML before sending it, so it will work with the WYSIWYG. Then, the user saves it, and the wikisyntax is converted irreversibly to HTML.
I don't think that will round-trip successfully.
But theunderlying representation will no longer be important to most users;
This is not as important as other aspects of this.
anyone who wants to edit it directly is probably hardcore enough to deal with HTML in any case.
Who said anything about HTML?
And I rather strongly suspect that you'd find that *lots* of the editors we have now would much prefer to stay in wikitext. I'm damned sure I would.
This would have a side benefit of greatlysimplifying wikitext parsers, ours included (we can even assume that the submitted HTML is XML-compliant!).
Oh. You're planning to toss wikitext entirely.
I can guarantee you, without even asking, that that will never, ever, happen.
So does anyone see any reason to keep wikisyntax at this point, beyond what actually needs to be parsed beyond sanitization?
I can't *wait* to read the other answer to *this*. :-)
Cheers, -- jra