[Mediawiki-l] what-you-see-is-what-you-get edit program?

[Evan Prodromou]

On Sun, 2005-13-03 at 12:43 -0700, Sterling D. Allan wrote:

> Can anyone tell me if there is already in existence an editor program that 
> enables one to edit mediawiki pages in a "what you see is what you get" mode 
> (editing for dummies)?
> 
> I have an associate who says he could build such a program quite easily. 
> I'm thinking, if it's so easy why hasn't it been done; surely it has been 
> done; if so, where?

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. There's a good discussion
on meta.wikimedia.org:

        http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG

Here'd be my guess why it hasn't been implemented yet:

      * If you use an in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor (the best user
        experience, in my opinion), you've got to create an
        HTML-to-Wikitext converter. We keep changing the Wikitext
        format, so it's a moving target.
      * Also, for an in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor, there's tons of
        customization to do. Links? Images? Templates? These are all
        kind of hard. And you have to figure out how to block out
        unwanted HTML elements, like <span> and <div>.
      * There are too many cross-browser in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor
        tools (Kupu, htmlArea, fckEditor, epoz, dot dot dot). Nobody's
        up for committing to one or the other.
      * If you use an out-of-browser editor (I think there's some other
        ideas for doing that), you have to figure out how to get your
        Wikitext in and out of the server, avoid edit conflicts, and
        deal with lots and lots and lots of platform issues.
      * The main developers of MediaWiki concentrate on the needs of
        Wikimedia, and most of their development effort goes into a)
        reducing load on their servers and b) putting in stricter
        security features.
      * It will probably require some serious prioritization by
        MediaWiki developers, and it's just not there.
      * It's a huge frickin' undertaking. Most features in MediaWiki are
        wedged-in 4-liners.
      * There are few other public systems using in-browser WYSIWYG HTML
        editors (I think Wacko Wiki is the only major Wiki engine doing
        it, for example), so there's not a lot of pressure to get it
        working.

If your associate is really interested in helping out with this, it
needs to be done. I think if we ever get around to making a development
roadmap, WYSIWYG editing should be part of a 2.x system.

~Evan

-- 
Evan Prodromou
evan at bad.dynu.ca
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