On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 00:49, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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 :)
I agree, wikitext is notoriously developer-unfriendly. A survey of
currently existing ideas and extensions is on
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor
As a shameless self-promotion, I encourage you to look at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor for the approach we
took:
1. supporting only a limited subset of wikitext
2. supporting that subset well, leaving a clean history
The rationale here is that supporting all quirks of wikitext adds
little value both for new users (they should not be editing complex
stuff anyways!) and for advanced users (who probably already know
wikitext). I hope this idea can be useful to you.
However, the "editing mode" provided by browsers is a nightmare of
incompatibilities. Basically, each browser produces a different output
given identical commands, so currently MeanEditor is not completely up
to the task. An external application might be an interesting solution.