2009/9/24 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru wrote:
So it would be menu and icon-driven editing, where the hands should move from keyboard to mouse and vice versa, like MS Word. Not very handy for programmers and people who prefer to do most of tasks in command line.
Programmers rank far, far below normal people when it comes to usability prioritization.
Indeed, as do robot editors. This is part of the "no way, not even with logic twisting, is the impenetrability of wikitext a feature."
As far as I'm concerned, a situation in which WYSIWYG is the only supported editing method would be far superior to the current situation. If we could allow power users to edit manually, that would be a nice bonus. Note that even if we use a format like XML that's a pain to manually edit, programmers can write up their own front-ends if they like -- they're programmers, after all! And also note that as with most WYSIWYG editors, there would presumably be a slew of keyboard shortcuts for power users to memorize if they didn't want to use the mouse.
Realistically, Tim has already stated we're not throwing out wikitext because of the huge body of text already in it. WYSIWYG editing is getting there bit by bit - FCKeditor would be fine on a fresh wiki without the unspeakable atrocities inventive geeks have perpetrated upon wikitext on en:wp and should continue to get better at dealing with more obtusities.
- d.