Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/22/06, Plyd wiki.vincent@amplyd.com wrote:
About Wysiwyg, I think that we could limit functionalities in order to encourage people to write "normally" and don't add lots of unusefull stupid tags. But Wysiwyg has its real value for tables&co, because for beginners this is a complete mess. What about an hybrid system ?
Ok, there are obviously two different meanings to WYSIWYG that are being used.
- Allowing free formatting, such that any combinations of colours,
fonts, font sizes etc can be used (not a good idea)
We have this right now, so I can tell you right now that this is orthogonal to the issue of WYSIWYG (or WYSIWYM).
Fancy colors aren't something we'd want to make _easy_ because they're not something we generally encourage in clean text. But they'd be _possible_ because they're possible in our markup.
- Allowing normal Wiki formatting (bold, italics, headings, tables,
images) to be edited graphically, rather than through Wiki syntax (good idea?)
At least potentially this is a good idea.
In practice, public-ready implementation will have to hold off until the markup is defined well enough that we have reversible transformations and can 'hold out' fancy stuff like images, templates, extensions, and parser functions cleanly into WYSIWYM-friendly chunks.
We will likely not have "true" WYSIWYG in the sense of it the editing view being exactly 100% one and the same as the reading view, because things like embedded data, plugins, templates etc really require some separation.
I'd like to get a working group together to start making the specification happen soon:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)