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

[Sj]

A WYSIWYG option for wiki-editing would be just wonderful.  In fact,
since one of the problems with this is finding a tool that works in
all browsers, simply offering options for what the user's edit-area
looks like, would be a good place to start.

Evan makes some great points:
>         http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
< 
>       * If you use an in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor...
>         you've got to create an HTML-to-Wikitext converter. 

It might be possible to just make it a wikitext editor, and run a
Wikitext-to-HTML converter for displaying it as you type.  To get an
idea of how much wiki-formatting there is to handle, see for instance
Pilaf's preview-javascript:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Pilaf/livepreview.js

<         customization to do. Links? Images? Templates? These are all

Checking to see if a link is red or not is hard.  Images and templates
don't have to be rendered immediately, but could be displayed more
intuitively; i.e.,
*  "<green><i>Template:my-text</i></green>" 
*  "<green><b>Image:Mary figurine</b> (right-aligned, 200 pixels
wide)</green> <blue><i>Luminescent figurine</i></blue>"
rather than "{{my-text}}" or "[[Image:Mary
figurine|right|200px|Luminescent figurine]]"

<       * It will probably require some serious prioritization by
>         MediaWiki developers, and it's just not there.

Perhaps.  It seems to me that someone could write an in-browser wiki
editor which did a decent job of providing WYSIWYG for 90% of an
editor's needs, without worrying about the parsing details for
cutting-edge wiki syntax.  Then you could make switching to that
editor a preference which could be toggled from the edit page:

________________________________________
<h1> Editing PAGENAME </h1>
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[ ] Show edit toolbar   |   Edit tool:  [ ] Walt's WYSIWYG editor   [
] Default wiki editor
________________________________________


>       * 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.

Don't forget about Web's Biggest.  Their site may be slooooow, but
they at least have a "major" sense of self-worth.
       http://dirs.org/dir-wiki.cfm?cat=Wikipedia_1&tab=edit

-- 
+sj+