Thanks Sheldon - those are excellent points. The conversion back-and-forth through HTML seems to be a sticky spot.
I wonder if there's any happy-medium? If pages could be flagged as "Wikitext" or "HTML", then using a WYSIWYG on the HTML pages and traditional edit on Wikitext articles could make sense.
The idea being that _some people_ could write "content" pages with their pretty WYSIWYG editor, and _other people_ could wire them all together via templates and transclusion. Something akin to the separation of concerns between HTML and CSS. You could even section-off portions of pages with parser tags (<wysiwyg>some text</wysiwyg> etc), and a wysiwyg editor would only touch those portions, leaving the rest unscathed.
The benefits of this approach is that it can started right away and probably be completed through extensions alone. (Though admittedly it'd be easier if the Massive Hook Proposal were implemented)
Of course the obvious retort is "boy it sure would be nice if we could just pick which editor we want and have them seamlessly interoperate" - but I hope we can all agree that this is a ways off from where we are today.
Would anyone else find a split solution like this acceptable? Am I alone in thinking this is a good mid-term approach?
P.S. - Thanks Sheldon for plugging WikiArticleFeeds (the RSS extension) - if you run into any issues, have enhancement requests etc, I'd love to hear about them. Thanks!
-- Jim
On 3/7/07, Sheldon Rampton sheldon@prwatch.org wrote:
Jim Wilson wilson.jim.r@gmail.com wrote:
I agree wholeheartedly with Jared. A rewrite shouldn't invalidate everyone's collective time spent learning the current syntax. I mean, that's a whole lot of peoples time you could potentially be wasting.
I agree with you on this point. People should definitely still be able to input and edit articles using the same wikitext markup to which they've grown accustomed. Increasingly, however, people are wanting something easier. I know people who find wikitext difficult and are asking for WYSIWYG. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to use wikitext as a basis for WYSIWYG. The people who are trying to do it are going through something like the following:
wikitext -> HTML -> a Javascript WYSIWYG editor
When they save their changes, they have to go back through HTML on the way to wikitext, and since there's no one-to-one correspondence between wikitext and HTML, the results are inconsistent. It's hard to imagine a good fix for this problem because the only people interested in working on wikitext-to-HTML conversion are a subset of the relatively small number who actually write code for MediaWiki. Moreover, it's a moving target. Wikitext syntax changes every time someone writes a new parser function, and with the proliferation of MediaWiki-powered websites outside Wikimedia, it's looking more and more like a language with numerous dialects rather than a single consistent markup standard.
I realize that it's ambitious to contemplate putting XML under the hood of MediaWiki -- just as it was ambitious in its day for Apple to contemplate putting Unix under the hood of its graphical user interface. The result, however, was a better, more extensible operating system. If they hadn't done it, they'd probably have gone the way of Atari or Amiga.
IMHO, MediaWiki is currently the best software in existence for web- based wikis, and it has the considerable advantage of serving as the content management system for Wikipedia, which alone will guarantee its place in the world for the foreseeable future. However, there are other competitors in the wings that are getting serious about WYSIWYG, and MediaWiki might start to look dated if other platforms manage to offer a significantly more user-friendly experience.
By the way, Jim...I like your RSS extension. I'm probably going to install it on my own wiki.
| Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever
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