On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote:
On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 7:33 PM, Fred Bauder
<fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>
wrote:
>> Beyond that let's flip the question
the other way -- what do we *want*
> out
> of WYSIWYG editing, and can that tool provide it or what else do we
need?
We want something simpler and easier to use. That is not what Wikia has.
I could hardly stand trying it out for a few minutes.
So, why not use my WYSIFTW approach? It will only "parse" the parts of
the wikitext that it can turn back, edited or unedited, into wikitext,
unaltered (including whitespace) if not manually changed. Some parts
may therefore stay as wikitext, but it's very rare (except lists,
which I didn't implement yet, but they look intuitive enough).
There's a lot I like about the WYSIFTW tool:
* replacing the section edits inline is kinda nice
* folding of extensions and templates is intelligent and allows you to edit
them easily (unlike Wikia's which drops in opaque placeholders, currently
requiring you to switch the *entire* section to source mode to change them
at all) -- some infoboxes for instance show up as basically editable tables
of parameter pairs, which is pretty workable!
* popup menus on links, images, etc provide access to detail controls
without cluttering up their regular view
I've added a side-by-side view of a popular article (top of [[w:Barack
Obama]]) with its WYSIFTW editing view and the Wikia editor (which just
gives up and shows source) at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikitext.next#Problems
There are though cases where WYSIFTW gets confused, such as a <ref> with
multi-line contents -- it doesn't get that the lists, templates etc are
inside the ref rather than outside, which messes up the folding.
These sorts of things are why I think it'd be a win to use a common
wikitext->AST parser for both rendering and editing tasks: if they're
consistent we eliminate a lot of such odd edge cases. It could also make it
much easier to do fine-grained editing; instead of invoking the editor on an
entire section at a time, we could click straight into a paragraph, table,
reference, etc, knowing that the editor and the renderer both are dividing
the page up the same way.
-- brion