On 8/14/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
Do that, and I won't edit. Do that, and people using older browsers (long live lynx) and screen readers, or not embracing "newfangled" script technologies, etc. can't. So hiding wiki markup and locking it out of sight is not an option, and it should not be. If Joe User wants to view his markup, he should be allowed to. WYSIWYG is *not* a quick fix for the parser.
So how about using XHTML internally and when sending to WYSIWYG, but if the user wants to manually edit it can be converted to wikitext and then back? That way, third parties can make easy use of the dumps, and WYSIWYG becomes easier to work with, but those who really want the old markup can use it. There's no particular reason there shouldn't be a basically one-to-one correspondence between wikitext and XHTML — the latter would largely just be a translation of the former into different syntax.
Of course, I suppose discussions here about how WYSIWYG will work are kind of pointless anyway, when it's being integrated into MediaWiki by a third party as we speak . . .