I'm a "geek" and do not "dislike" or "despise"
XML/[X]HTML or WYSIWYG or
wikimarkup. They all have their uses for different users and even the same
user in different situations for different purposes. And I would rather
chew my own feet off than have to type '<template name="citation needed"
/>'. Meanwhile, a WYSIWYG-only editing environment leads to problems (most
often overlapping markup, and markup that is not quite constrained to where
it should be; anyone who has used something like Microsoft Word more than a
handful of times knows exactly what I mean, because you've time and again
italicized or boldfaced something and found it difficult to get this effect
to stop on subsequent text, so often that it's usually easier to write the
text with no markup, then go back in and specifically add it to the bits
that need emphasis.
Or to put it in wikimarkup terms, what you want it is:
Tolkien's masterpiece, ''The Lord of the Rings'', was written
between...
but what WYSIWYG editors often give you is:
Tolkien's masterpiece, ''The Lord of the Rings, ''was written
between...
because it's virtually impossible sometimes to tell when WYSIWYG italics
are including more than they should.
Just one example. It's a major issue for metadata and machine readability,
especially when templates are applying classes:
Tolkien's masterpiece, {{titletext|The Lord of the Rings, }}was written
between...
applying a 'class="work-title"', would produce factually incorrect
output
(i.e., in one context at least, outright *corrupt data*) that said that a
comma-space was part of the title of the work.
It's important that we be able to access and edit the source, without it
looking like almost-human-unreadble TeX or RTF, and that geeky editors be
able to edit all the time in source mode without ever seeing WYSIWYG if
that's their preference (it would be mine; I still hand-code a lot when
building websites, too, even if I let whatever the platform is (WordPress,
whatever) generate a lot of the basic structure automatically. It's
crucial that I be able to tweak stuff at the character-by-character level,
and alter the markup around that content in any way I need to.
But for actual article drafting, in prose sentences and paragraphs, as
opposed to tweaking, I vastly prefer WYSIWYG. I seriously doubt I'm alone
in any of this, even in the combination of preferences I've outlined.
--
Stanton McCandlish
McCandlish Consulting
9505 Tanoan Dr NE
Albuquerque NM 87111-5836
505 715-7650
http://www.facebook.com/Stanton.McCandlish