Павел Петроченко wrote:
Hi guys,
At the moment we are discussing an opportunity to create full scale true WYSIWYG client for media wiki. To the moment we have a technology which should allow us to implement with a good quality and quite fast. Unfortunately we are not sure if there is a real need/interest for having such kind of client at the media wiki world, as well as what are actual needs of media wiki users. So we decided to write to this list. Any feedback/suggestion will be very helpful.
P.S. Screen cast demonstrating our experimental client for Trac wiki http://www.screencast.com/t/MDkzYzM4
Regards, Pavel
Yes, of course we are interested on it. Specifically, the ideal WISIWYG MediaWiki editor would allow easy WISIWYG editing to newbies, while still allowing to use the full wikisyntax to power users, without inserting crappy markup when using it, or reordering everything to its liking when WISIWYG was used to do a little change.
From the screencast, it seems your technology is based in a local
application instead of web. That's is a little inconvenience for the users, but an acceptable one IMHO. You could plug your app as an external editor, see: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:External_editors
The problem that makes this really hard is that MediaWiki syntax is not nice. So I'm a bit skeptical about that fast quality editor. You can find in the list archives many discussions about it, and also in wikitext-l. Things like providing a ribbon is a completely esthetical choice, it can't really help on the result of its editing. Maybe your backend is powerful enough to handle this without problems. Please, show me wrong :)