On 02/14/2014 06:40 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
On 02/14/2014 10:39 PM, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
VisualEditor is an HTML editor and doesn't know about wikitext.
That single sentence explains so much.
I think Gabriel is simplifying a little. VisualEditor is an editor that understands, edits, and preserves semantically rich, augmented, HTML 5.
If you look at the HTML source code of http://parsoid.wmflabs.org/enwiki/Earth , you can see that while it is HTML, it is carefully augmented with additional information.
Among other things, that allows VisualEditor to handle MediaWiki-specific features, such as templates.
After the user is done editing with VisualEditor, Parsoid then turns that augmented HTML back into wikitext, generally without dirty diffs.
If you would have told me two years ago, I could have said "wrong path, this will fail". (Of course, many would have protested and refused to listen to sound advice, but now we know the outcome.)
If you're saying that VisualEditor has failed, I disagree. I don't judge software quality by whether it's opt-in or opt-out (this is a question of configuration, and will probably change over time), but on its own merits. VisualEditor has already fulfilled many requirements, and is still improving.
Matt Flaschen