On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 00:31, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)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