[Mediawiki-l] Re: easy html formatting?

[Joshua Yeidel]

On 12/21/05 9:12 PM, "Jan Steinman" <Jan at Bytesmiths.com> wrote:

>> From: Sy Ali <sy1234 at gmail.com>
>> 
>> On 12/21/05, Henry Ortega <juandelacruz at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Is there an easy way to edit or create articles with proper HTML
>>> formatting?
>> 
>> Short answer: No
> 
> I think this is one of many, "Can I beat and hammer MediaWiki into
> something I'm more used to."

Or another:  "Mediawiki would make a _great_ content management system, if
only it weren't so... Wiki-ish."

> 
> I think, not only is the answer, "No," but it's actually, "No, isn't
> that grand!"

There's always a trade-off between simplicity and expressiveness and power.
In the case of wikis, some authorial expressiveness is sacrificed to two
related goals:

1) making authoring simple so people will become engaged
2) keeping enough commonality of appearance so that the "community property"
aspect of the wiki is not submerged by individual formatting quirks.

Most content management systems attempt to achieve these goals via
templates;  wikis typically attempt to achieve them by limited markup
vocabularies;  bulletin boards often off UBBcode or another markup for
similar reasons.  None of these strategies is entirely satisfactory even for
their own purposes.

Choose the medicine that fits your ills...

-- Joshua