On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 2:55 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote: <snip>
We disagree on that one then. VisualEditor is meant to hide wikitext entirely. The primary focus is on people that don't know wikitext. I agree that we should keep nowiki-fication to a minimum and get rid of the other bugs that cause this to happen, but I think the action we currently take when a user types in wikitext (which is to warn them and say "this won't work") is appropriate. VE is meant to be a visual editor, not a visual-except-with-weird-shortcuts-that-only-make-sense-if-you-know-the-legacy-markup-we-used-before-your-time editor.
That's my opinion. Actual product direction is not something I'm in charge of, that's James F's job, but AFAIK our current product direction is similar to what I just said.
<snip>
If we accept, as a premise, that VE is aiming to eventually be the best possible wiki editor for everyone, then I would say part of that includes providing shortcuts and alternative workflows for some tasks. Often power users may want an approach that works well for them, but isn't necessarily intended to be easily discoverable by newbies. Keyboard shortcuts are an example of this on many platforms.
To use an obvious example, the template editor coupled to TemplateData is snazzy and probably helpful to many users who don't know parameter names or aren't comfortable with syntax. That said, the template editor is not particularly fast. For many applications using it can be much more cumbersome than editing the wikitext directly, assuming you already know what you want to edit / add.
While developers can (and probably should) work on making tools like the template editor easier to use, that isn't necessarily the best solution for all users. For many workflows giving power users a limited means of manipulating wikitext directly -- without busting all the way out of VE -- would seem to be a natural way of improving the power user experience. Access to wikitext within VE could be controlled by a button, or an option, or a keyboard shortcut, or magic keystrokes like "[[" and "{{" that just work the old way. Any of those approaches could work and each comes with different pluses and minuses. In the long run providing good usability for the complex tasks frequently performed by power users is just as important as providing tools for newbies (at least if we assume VE is intended for everyone), and I strongly believe that some form of advanced shortcuts or integrated wikitext-like mode will likely be a part of that.
It's not enough to provide a pretty visual interface. One also has to find ways to make that interface efficient and useful across a wide spectrum of different user needs.
-Robert Rohde