On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 02:51:43PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
But the data is completely anecdotal: we have people who complain about it. Great. But we have *hundreds of thousands* of editors who have created, literally, millions of pages on Wikipedia.
Pfft. That's equally anecdotal.
No it's not. It's statistical.
And I rather strongly suspect that you'd find that *lots* of the editors we have now would much prefer to stay in wikitext. I'm damned sure I would.
If the WYSIWYG editor were actually good, and actually displayed *exactly* what the end result would be, I think you'd find that you'd acclimate to it extremely quickly. I agree that most existing WYSIWYG editors are obnoxious in various ways; this plan is contingent upon making one that is not. If you would still prefer to edit it directly, hey, XML is meant to be human-readable.
Really, no. It's long since been scientifically tested and proven that people who keep their hands on the keyboard can accomplish tasks much faster than those who have to move them to the mouse.
On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Wikitext is one of the simplest markup schemata -- for it's power -- that I have *ever* seen, in 20 years of staring at markup languages.
In terms of easiness to learn and type, yes. In terms of the backend syntax, it's hell, especially when prefab syntaxes are available that will serve the purpose just as well. Some people are currently struggling to put together a grammar so that a decent parser can be compiled, effort that's completely pointless when we could just use XML.
I hereby sentence you to type your entries in XML.
Since, y'know, that's what you're doing to *me*.
On 8/11/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
But you remain correct: an overlay WYSIWYG editor, perhaps within the contstraints Steve mentioned in an earlier message, will serve the requirements you have, without requiring much (if any) underlying modification.
If one can be written that doesn't show up massive discrepancies with the actual displayed text . . . if the Wikiwyg programmers didn't have to deal with the crazy syntax, they could work on stuff like displaying templates properly instead of getting weird mixes of varying numbers of apostrophes to mimic the behavior of our labrynthine parser.
Evolutionary change.
Cheers, -- jra