On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 04:31:13PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
Jay, with all due respect, you're a programmer.
But I'm not. I hate writing code. That's what coders are for.
I'm primarily an analyst/designer, and that's what I've done for the
last 20 years. The last year or so, to, I suspect, everyone's
surprise, I've done helpdesk. Quite successfully. So I'm not at all
unequipped to spend extensive time talking to non-computer-savvy users.
You're comfortable
with codes and so on. You'd probably be fairly comfortable with HTML
too. You're probably also comfortable with command lines. Most
people are not. It doesn't matter how simple you make it--many people
are going to be put off by markup of any kind. I know many such
people: anything resembling codes makes them instantly uncomfortable.
"Screw them" is not a productive answer.
And indeed, it's not the answer I'd give *them*.
The answer I'd give *them* is the one I gave Christiaan *first*, and
which ties directly into your next comment:
As for the problem at hand: quite simply, a WYSIWYG
editor that
implements all of our wikisyntax is totally impossible. It's way, way
too complicated to implement smoothly in Javascript. But you know,
the entire *point* of using wikisyntax rather than HTML is to make
editing *easier*. If it stands in the way of creating an
easier-to-use interface, don't you think it's outlived its usefulness?
If indeed it does, yes.
But the data is completely anecdotal: we have people who complain about
it. Great. But we have *hundreds of thousands* of editors who have
created, literally, millions of pages on Wikipedia.
So clearly, it's not unusable.
So how about this. Design a WYSIWYG editor that works
with cleaned
HTML, plus whatever syntaxes aren't replicable in HTML. Make sure
this editor is high-quality, and then make it the default editor.
Then, anytime someone requests a section or page, just convert all the
wikisyntax (tables, bold, italics, headers, etc.) into HTML before
sending it, so it will work with the WYSIWYG. Then, the user saves
it, and the wikisyntax is converted irreversibly to HTML.
I don't think that will round-trip successfully.
But the
underlying representation will no longer be important to most users;
This is not as important as other aspects of this.
anyone who wants to edit it directly is probably
hardcore enough to
deal with HTML in any case.
Who said anything about HTML?
And I rather strongly suspect that you'd find that *lots* of the
editors we have now would much prefer to stay in wikitext. I'm damned
sure I would.
This would have a side
benefit of greatly
simplifying wikitext parsers, ours included (we can even assume that
the submitted HTML is XML-compliant!).
Oh. You're planning to toss wikitext entirely.
I can guarantee you, without even asking, that that will never, ever,
happen.
So does anyone see any reason to keep wikisyntax at
this point, beyond
what actually needs to be parsed beyond sanitization?
I can't *wait* to read the other answer to *this*. :-)
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.