On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 00:31, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
Wiki syntax is too complicated for this to be feasible. It also doesn't have a one-to-one mapping to HTML. It's been tried before, but what you end up with is that it doesn't round-trip: if you open in the WYSIWYG editor and save with no changes, it saves totally different wikicode, confusing anyone who's using actual wikitext. The only feasible solutions are to either drastically simplify wikitext, or switch to WYSIWYG only, and those would both be very disruptive.
Another solution would be to identify a "simple" subset of wikitext for which the mapping to XHTML is one-to-one and refuse to work on anything else (i.e. revert to the standard editor). The rationale here is that a visual editor would (probably) be aimed at new editors, and they should probably avoid complicated syntax anyways. That's the approach we took on MeanEditor http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor.
In our experience, the biggest obstacle is to get the different browsers to reliably make the same changes to HTML. The editor interface is non-standard, and browsers sometimes disagree on encoding rules, escaping, choice of tags, etc.
Anyways, there is a survey of existing approaches at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor. This might be useful to new editor developers, and if you find a cool idea it would be nice to contribute to the page. The usability project also did a survey last year: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environment_Survey/MediaWiki_Extensions/Results. In the end, I think the FCKeditor developers did an amazing work, but I am still convinced that a simple (and hopefully reliable) HTML-based solution would have a purpose. Also, it's nice to be able to compare different designs. Bye, -- Jacopo