On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 00:49, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
The problem that makes this really hard is that MediaWiki syntax is not nice. So I'm a bit skeptical about that fast quality editor. You can find in the list archives many discussions about it, and also in wikitext-l. Things like providing a ribbon is a completely esthetical choice, it can't really help on the result of its editing. Maybe your backend is powerful enough to handle this without problems. Please, show me wrong :)
I agree, wikitext is notoriously developer-unfriendly. A survey of currently existing ideas and extensions is on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor
As a shameless self-promotion, I encourage you to look at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor for the approach we took: 1. supporting only a limited subset of wikitext 2. supporting that subset well, leaving a clean history
The rationale here is that supporting all quirks of wikitext adds little value both for new users (they should not be editing complex stuff anyways!) and for advanced users (who probably already know wikitext). I hope this idea can be useful to you.
However, the "editing mode" provided by browsers is a nightmare of incompatibilities. Basically, each browser produces a different output given identical commands, so currently MeanEditor is not completely up to the task. An external application might be an interesting solution.