On 8/14/06, Edward Z. Yang edwardzyang@thewritingpot.com wrote:
There's a difference between making things difficult and not making shortcuts for those things. You could look at wikitext as HTML on steroids: non-SGML shortcuts for the most commonly used formatting, but after that you have to use HTML.
If we make a WYSIWIG editor, I wouldn't give users a box to pick colors with. I probably wouldn't let them change font either (though switching to monospace is acceptable) or let them change font size. If they want to do that, let them switch to HTML mode and write the HTML themselves.
I would probably do that too, but simply because font-changing is an incredibly rare thing to want to do at Wikipedia, and therefore of little value in the GUI. I don't think I've ever changed typeface, and only occasionally changed point size, mostly for tables. Changing font color is occasionally useful for tables - but it would be much better to have predefined styles for that.
All of this is quite a tangent from the original question about WYSIWYG editors though. The basic question is "is it possible to have a user-friendly, genuine WYSIWYG editing tool that does not conflict with editors working directly in wikitext". The follow-up question is "is anyone going to write it?"
Steve