Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 18:14:21 -0400 From: "Jay R. Ashworth" jra@baylink.com Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Wiki markup <-> MS Word? To: wikitech-l@wikimedia.org Message-ID: 20060522221421.GB5518@cgi.jachomes.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Mon, May 22, 2006 at 11:53:32PM +0200, Chuck Smith wrote:

...

We have actually implemented this kind of WYSIWiki (What You See Is Wiki) editor as a Java applet called WikiWizard for the JSPWiki. We will also be presenting it at Wikimania if our proposal is accepted. I have already talked with Brion Vibber about integrating it into Wikipedia and we would be happy to do that, but we are now waiting for the Wikipedia wiki markup spec to be finalized. In the meantime, we are continuing to debug our software and add new features. One of its more interesting features is the ability to copy from Word and paste formatted directly into the applet and have your content automatically pasted in as wiki syntax.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but it would probably be good to keep in mind, too, that wiring the wikitext syntax into an editor like this puts binders on the extension of that syntax: it has to be done in two places.

That may not be the best thing.

This is why we set up the WikiWizard so that an XML file describes the wiki syntax to the editor, so that it can theoretically work in different wiki engines and so that it can be altered quite quickly without touching the base code if wiki syntax changes. Of course, when we adapt it for the second engine, we'll see how much our applet needs to be changed to make it generic for multiple wiki engines. This is one reason we're heavily pushing for a wiki markup standard, but I don't want to open that can of worms on this mailing list.

Chuck