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Moin,
On Thursday 22 December 2005 13:34, Ray Saintonge wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
The advantage of wikitext for mere humans is that it starts working as plain text, then you can add wikitext soup to it and you still get a result that nontechnical people can read and write.
Wikitext is formally horrible, but seems to work with human editors. Wikipedia is one of those wonderful pieces of technology that works for technophobes *and* advanced geeks (e.g. Mac OS X, LiveJournal, Firefox) - which I think should be a goal of all programs where possible, btw.
People learn wikitext like learning a language. They try stuff and it gets meaning across. They learn more and it gets more of the meaning across. They gain proficiency as they go.
This is perhaps one of the factors in Wikipedia's success.
For people who want to write text only the only essential wiki knowledge may be to add an extra carriage return to separate paragraphs.
And this is also the reason I "invented" a new "language" for my graph extension - the graphviz code is a language that is written by programmers for programmers, e.g. "normal" people struggle a lot with it.
I really like the easyness of the wiki syntax and the table code in wiki is IMHO much better than the dreaded "<table>" tag soup you usually end up.
My € 0.02,
Tels
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