[Mediawiki-l] Re: Wikiwyg

[Jim Higson]

Jamie Bliss wrote:


Hi.

I had no idea of the wikiwyg.net site. Hmmm... the naming does seem to be a
bit of a collision, but I'm guessing they just hadn't seen my project. I
own wikiwyg.org, but haven't set anything up on it yet - I had a pretty
serious injury a while back so laid off the geeking for a bit. I'll fire
them off a mail and post here what they say.

Anyway, my limbs are coming back online so I should have my domain properly
running soon, maybe middle of next week and then I'll start promoting my
little project a bit more. Now I've graduated it's done as a dissertation
(I got 84% for it, btw :) and I can put it properly under the GPL.

Coming soon should be some better compatability. I finally got an old
Windows box donated, so getting it working in IE 6 is certainly doable.
First though, I'll get Konqueror/Safari working, because Konq is my main
browser.

The wikiwyg.net stuff seems to be a textarea implementation. That's an
approach I considered, but has some drawbacks that I couldn't really think
of serious ways of getting around. One is that the same end result can be
written several ways as wikitext, and if you're transforming to HTML and
then back, the wikitext tends to get a bit mangled/ugly. This is fine if
people only ever use the rich editor, but if you have users on both the
rich editor users would probably be despised by the plain editor users for
junking a load of wikitext formatting whenever they edit. I don't really
want to comment on their project too much (holy war etc)

--
Ta,
Jim

> On 8/23/05, Jonathan Sanderson
> <lists at quernstone.com> wrote:
>> In case people haven't seen the various bits of news coming out of
>> (Foo|Bar)Camp last weekend: Wikiwyg is a demonstration of an in-
>> browser WYSIWYG wiki editor. It's Mozilla/Firefox only, but rather
>> elegant nonetheless.
>> 
>>      <http://www.wikiwyg.net/>
>> 
>> Not that I wish to kick off a holy war, but with current wikis,
>> including MediaWiki, there's clearly a learning curve for 'general
>> public' users. Often, they're new not just to the wiki concept, but
>> also to the very idea of markup. My own recent wiki project foundered
>> on that hurdle; Wikiwyg is the sort of system that might make wikis
>> dramatically more straightforward to casual users.
>> 
>> Besides, it's kinda fun to play with.
>> 
>> Lots of discussion around the blogosphere:
>>      <http://technorati.com/search/wikiwyg>
>> 
>> --
>> Jonathan Sanderson
>> 'If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.' (Pascal)
> 
> Odd. I thought Wikiwyg was <http://81.5.150.113/wysi/>. I think it's
> also much cooler. I'm working on a Client-side reader/editor written
> in XUL/JS based on it. See my blog entry
> <http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/blog/wikiwyg/>.
> 
> I think you may have kicked off a holy war of a different kind.
>