[Mediawiki-l] FCK Editor svn head and MW 1.16b2 - correct venue?

[Steve VanSlyck]

MOving over to the other side of the argument for a moment, it seems to me 
that the building could be built one brick at a time. E.g., get the basic 
features in place first, such as bolding, underscoring, links, and 
god-forbid tables - and then move on from there. Worry only about the 
visual componets and leave under-the-hood stuff like categories for 
another day.

Whenever I need to write a 6-inch long formula in Excel, it rarely saves 
any time or effort if I try to do it all at once. Invariable breaking the 
problem down into smaller parts, then joining them up, results in a 
working solution "more fasterer."

Not that anyone here needs a lesson in applied software engineering, but 
maybe the problem really *is* that too much is being attempted in the 
first go.

----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel Barrett <danb at VistaPrint.com>
To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list 
<mediawiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 13:24:31 -0400
Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] FCK Editor svn head and MW 1.16b2 - correct 
venue?

> James Sullivan wrote:
> >Well, yes and no.  Early word processors were quite buggy,
> >and they had to produce postscript to send to a laser printer...
> 
> Hmmm, the "early word processors" I remember were HARDWARE. I guess that 
makes me ancient. :-)
> 
> >...but improvements were made and today we expect word processors to 
work flawlessly...
> 
> Well, yes... except they don't. :-)  My wife's word processor (Word 2008 
on the Mac) crashes almost daily. And even the most sophisticated word 
processors today lack advanced features for writers.  Consider a simple 
search-and-replace that changes "MediaWiki" into "Wikimedia."  What if 
you want replacement only if "MediaWiki" is in a level-1 heading?  Or 
only when it's part of a URL?
> 
> I'm going off on a tangent, so I'll stop here. :-)
> 
> Anyway, I agree with your points in principle and definitely welcome 
improvements to ease-of-use. I just don't think they're going to come in 
the form of a fantastic WYSIWYG wiki editor, because the features that 
make MediaWiki great, as opposed to merely good (templates, parser 
functions, parent & child categories, etc.), seem incredibly difficult to 
support in WYSIWYG, and even harder to prevent novices from deleting by 
accident.
> 
> DanB
> 
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