Tyler Romeo wrote:
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 9:35 PM, James Forrester jforrester@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Each added preference adds to the complexity of our software - so increasing the cost and slowness of development and testing, and the difficulty of user support.
Stop being so dramatic. This is clearly false.
Creating such a preference is a lie, and a lie I cannot endorse.
In conclusion, if you really think lying to the community is so bad, then I recommend the VE team stop doing so as well as stop shoving this propaganda down the community's throat as if VE is the second coming.
Actually, it would probably help if both sides of this debate stopped being so dramatic. No, VE is not the second coming -- of the deity or the devil. No, its developers shouldn't be jamming it down anyone's throats, but I think they do deserve to be at least a little bit proud of their accomplishment, because as we know it's been a very highly desired feature for a long time but has been very difficult to implement.
And on the other side, I don't think people should be calling it broken or a bad idea or dismissing it as something so repugnant that they want to ban it from their sight.
Now, don't get me wrong: I'm a low-level kind of guy, who hasn't used VE and probably never will; matter of fact just yesterday I was pining for the good old days of text formatting using troff. But I believe -- and I don't think this is a controversial belief -- that those of us who prefer markup as opposed to wysiwyg formatting are in a pretty tiny minority. Having a whole preference just so that a handful of people -- power users, no less! -- can hide one unused feature seems odd, a historical accident at best.
Here's a thought experiment: if visual editing had existed (with reasonable functionality) since day 1, would there ever have been a way to disable it, let alone a hue and cry over a lack of a way to disable it?
Now, given that it hasn't existed since day 1, a transition to its existence is bound to be wrenching, but my hunch is that in a year or two all this consternation (over VE's existence, or initial bugginess, or lack of disableability) will be pretty much forgotten.
(Seriously, how hard is it to choose "edit source" if that's what you want to do?)