On 8/10/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
So does anyone see any reason to keep wikisyntax at this point, beyond what actually needs to be parsed beyond sanitization?
Ok, you're treating wikisyntax and HTML as essentially equivalent. Which they're not. For example, [[Foo]] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo Foo] both convert to <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo">Foo</A> in a given context, but they're not "the same". Maybe their difference isn't important either? Hard to say.
Wikisyntax is definitely "cleaner" than HTML and closer to the semantic representation of what we want to store. Storing only HTML (or XHTML) really ties us to a pretty specific presentation platform. By all means avoid the user having to see the wikisyntax as much as possible, but don't make the choice "HTML or GUI".
The more practical approach to me would be to layer an increasingly powerful GUI over the top that allows the user to edit most wikisyntax without even seeing it. Items that can't be edited (for the sake of argument, tables) would simply become atomic - there's a table there, but you can't edit it. You can delete it, you can copy it, you can paste it - but you can't edit it. If you want to edit it, you need to switch into a "hardcore" mode, where you actually see the code.
The obvious downside in any such system though is that the generated wikitext would necessarily look different from handcoded wikitext, and in our current MediaWiki system, every difference between two revisions is significant...
Steve