Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 5/22/06, Minh Nguyen mxn@zoomtown.com wrote:
I dunno... I have TinyMCE embedded into my copy of Movable Type, and I can tell you it does some /serious/ reformatting every time you load it.
[snip]
I was going to stay quiet on this one, but someone else is objecting...
WYSISYG editing isn't what we want most editors on Wikipedia to have.
We want them to have WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean). We generally do not want editors fussing with appearance too much while working on content, at least so long as we want people to stay productive (rather than spending hours futzing with getting the most attractive customized fonts for every heading) and so long as we want the look and feel to be even remotely consistent.
Our current system gets us pretty close to this, although the syntax does present a little learning curve. However, if people are really put off by the inability to do pretty formatting without a minimal amount of studying... can we really expect them to grok wiki writing overall?
So, improved editing systems.. not a bad thing, so long as we stay clear of turning the interface into a toy.
Well, I would be more in favor of having a built-in code highlighter instead of a WYSIWYG editor. I think it'd improve readability, especially with the new endnote syntax threatening to take over some articles. I was going to propose doing something like this for the Summer of Code, but I just couldn't think of an elegant way to implement it. Using TinyMCE for code would require converting HTML-encoded HTML/wikitext into HTML/wikitext, and a feature using Flash or Java probably wouldn't be that popular with users.
A developer for the XUL Widgets project http://xulwidgets.mozdev.org/ has been doing some thinking about this, though: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/weirdal/archives/015930.html and http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/weirdal/archives/015932.html. An pretty-printing editor written in XUL for Firefox and Netscape 6/7 would be pretty cool IMO.