On Jan 26, 2008 8:03 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
That's an interesting idea for the problem in general actually: a client which understands MediaWiki wikitext intimately, and simultaneously edits the visual form (e.g. HTML) and the wikitext as you press keys.
It might be easier if you could just not allow editing of things like templates (and other complicated things). I guess you could then use a bog-standard client-side HTML editor with only a bit of encoded metadata lurking about the place, and translate it server-side to wikitext. Not rendering templates as HTML in this mode -- e.g., substituting placeholders, or having the raw wikitext clear set off from the rest of the document somehow -- would undoubtedly be acceptable. In fact, isn't this basically what Wikiwyg does?
There is, however, a philosophical question of whether decent structural multi-output markup can be produced by a WYSIWYG editor with untrained users.
It should be straightforward to design such an editor. It need only provide semantic markup, is all. There are some editors for various formats that do this, typically billed as WYSIWYM (although I admit to not having used any). A WYSIWYG editor that provides only the markup options offered by basic wikitext now couldn't possibly be less semantic than the current wikitext, could it?