I&#39;m a &quot;geek&quot; and do not &quot;dislike&quot; or &quot;despise&quot; XML/[X]HTML or WYSIWYG or wikimarkup. They all have their uses for different users and even the same user in different situations for different purposes.  And I would rather chew my own feet off than have to type &#39;&lt;template name=&quot;citation needed&quot; /&gt;&#39;. Meanwhile, a WYSIWYG-only editing environment leads to problems (most often overlapping markup, and markup that is not quite constrained to where it should be; anyone who has used something like Microsoft Word more than a handful of times knows exactly what I mean, because you&#39;ve time and again italicized or boldfaced something and found it difficult to get this effect to stop on subsequent text, so often that it&#39;s usually easier to write the text with no markup, then go back in and specifically add it to the bits that need emphasis.<br>

<br>Or to put it in wikimarkup terms, what you want it is:<br> Tolkien&#39;s masterpiece, &#39;&#39;The Lord of the Rings&#39;&#39;, was written between...<br>but what WYSIWYG editors often give you is:<br>  Tolkien&#39;s masterpiece, &#39;&#39;The Lord of the Rings, &#39;&#39;was written between...<br>


because it&#39;s virtually impossible sometimes to tell when WYSIWYG italics are including more than they should.<br><br>Just one example. It&#39;s a major issue for metadata and machine readability, especially when templates are applying classes:<br>

  Tolkien&#39;s masterpiece, {{titletext|The Lord of the Rings, }}was written between...<br>applying a &#39;class=&quot;work-title&quot;&#39;, would produce factually incorrect output (i.e., in one context at least, outright *corrupt data*) that said that a comma-space was part of the title of the work.<br>



<br>It&#39;s important that we be able to access and edit the source, without it looking like almost-human-unreadble TeX or RTF, and that geeky editors be able to edit all the time in source mode without ever seeing WYSIWYG if that&#39;s their preference (it would be mine; I still hand-code a lot when building websites, too, even if I let whatever the platform is (WordPress, whatever) generate a lot of the basic structure automatically.  It&#39;s crucial that I be able to tweak stuff at the character-by-character level, and alter the markup around that content in any way I need to.<br clear="all">

<br>But for actual article drafting, in prose sentences and paragraphs, as opposed to tweaking, I vastly prefer WYSIWYG.  I seriously doubt I&#39;m alone in any of this, even in the combination of preferences I&#39;ve outlined.<br>

<br>--<br>Stanton McCandlish<br>
McCandlish Consulting<br>
9505 Tanoan Dr NE<br>
Albuquerque NM  87111-5836<br>
<br>
505 715-7650<br><br><a href="http://www.facebook.com/Stanton.McCandlish" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/Stanton.McCandlish</a><br><br>