On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 13:25 +0100, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
Through this mailing-list, I see that we are struggling with Wikitext, which is a time-consuming work. What I suggest is, instead of wasting more time, we can change to XML, which is clearer, easy to parse, easy to understand and easy to extend.
You want an XML based language for describing the formatting of webpages? Basically, you're suggesting we switch to XHTML (with more some features removed and a few added). XHTML is much harder to learn and use than wikitext, even for experienced users.
XHTML would only be good for the formatting aspects. It can't represent parser functions, template calls, etc. XML lets you mix and match vocabularies, of course.
-- Daniel
For the average user I believe Wikitext to be the easiest to learn, however I am not an expert on the technical aspects and ressources used by using Wikitext. On the subject of creating a WYSIWYG editor, I don't believe this is the best solution. Instead, the current editor could be expanded to include forms similar to many popular Blog softwares, e.g. Wordpress.
For example, if a user wants to include an image this is quite easy for an experienced user, however for a beginner it can be quite complicated. If instead a dialog would appear asking for various parameters, for example size, thumb, description and alignment, this would make it a lot more simpler - no matter if the result get's displayed as Wikitext or WYSIWYG.
Ian [[User:Poeloq]]
--- Ian A Holton Blog: http://www.ianholton.net