On Jan 26, 2008 8:03 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
That's an interesting idea for the problem in
general actually: a client
which understands MediaWiki wikitext intimately, and simultaneously edits
the visual form (e.g. HTML) and the wikitext as you press keys.
It might be easier if you could just not allow editing of things like
templates (and other complicated things). I guess you could then use
a bog-standard client-side HTML editor with only a bit of encoded
metadata lurking about the place, and translate it server-side to
wikitext. Not rendering templates as HTML in this mode -- e.g.,
substituting placeholders, or having the raw wikitext clear set off
from the rest of the document somehow -- would undoubtedly be
acceptable. In fact, isn't this basically what Wikiwyg does?
There is, however, a philosophical question of whether
decent structural
multi-output markup can be produced by a WYSIWYG editor with untrained users.
It should be straightforward to design such an editor. It need only
provide semantic markup, is all. There are some editors for various
formats that do this, typically billed as WYSIWYM (although I admit to
not having used any). A WYSIWYG editor that provides only the markup
options offered by basic wikitext now couldn't possibly be less
semantic than the current wikitext, could it?