Jim Higson wrote:
It's a
noble idea, but doing it properly (where it could replace the
normal mode of editing on a mature wiki like wikipedia) is *hard*.
Agreed, but I've got a year and want a good hard project :)
:)
I'm not sure the result would be worth the effort, but I'm sure you'll
learn all kinds of interesting things along the way (and hopefully
produce some useful modules doing so too).
Doing basic
wysiwyg stuff (bold, italic, links, paragraphs) is fairly
straightforward (particularly if classpath's implementation of swing's
rich text edit thingy is in good shape). Byt wysiwyg editing of hard
stuff like floating images and tables essentially entails reimplementing
rather a lot of the browser's display code in java.
It all depends how intact the GNU classpath is, but the javax.swing.text
packages are very full for this kind of thing, floating images shouldn't
really be a problem. There are quite a few ways I could tackle it.
When I was first researching the idea (when I saw 'export as XML' on the wiki)
I thought the wikitext must be converted to an intermediatory XML format, and
then to HTML/PDF/whatever via XSL. I see that this isn't the case, which
makes the applet a lot harder, I'd have to reproduce the function of the PHP
in Java and can't help but be a step behind.
Not to boss you around, but *do that bit first* :)
I'm really not convinced a wysiwyg editor is really all that necessary
(we have lots of technically challenged contributors banging aware
regardless). But a decent java parser that takes mediawiki markup and
builds a nice JDOM (or whatever) tree - that would have all kinds of
handy uses (and I think your editor will need it anyway).
Well, best of luck.
FIn
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W.Finlay McWalter [[User:Finlay McWalter]]
http://www.mcwalter.org
"With the thoughts you'd be thinkin', You could be another Lincoln..."