[pmwiki-users] wysiwyg editor for wiki

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Wed Jul 19 18:17:43 CDT 2006


On Thursday, 20 July 2006 3:27 AM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 08:57:44PM -0400, Henrik Bechmann wrote:
>> Thanks Patrick,
>> 
>> If I may offer the following:
>> 
>> In the broad sweep of web 2.0 evolution, I think that Wysiwig is 
>> inevitable, therefore for PmWiki, eventually it will be essential 
>> (version 3?).
>
>I'm not sure I agree that WYSIWYG is inevitable, nor that it will
>be essential.  I've been around the computing industry long enough
>to know that GUI doesn't always trump text.  :-)

I think both views are correct. For me, WYSIWYG wiki editing gets
in the way -- I like using wiki markup, I like using XML structured
editors and I find WYSIWYG tools like Word frustrating.

However, several people whose views I respect have stated that they 
will not use a wiki unless it has some form of WYSIWYG. It seems a 
shame that these people are denied the joy of wiki. For them, lack 
of WISIWYG is reason enough to eliminate wikis from consideration.
>
><snip>
>> 
>> In terms of approaches to the problem, I see from your references that 
>> you have mentioned two:
>>    a) based on the editor generating wiki code, background translation 
>> of wiki code fragments into HTML (through background xmlhttprequest aka 
>> AJAX processing
>>    b) based on the editor generating HTML code, translating the HTML 
>> into wikicode on save edits.
>> 
>><snip>
>
>> ; in terms of the latter, identifying ways of uniquely 
>> matching not only the semantic HTML elements to the wiki elements, but 
>> also the constituent parts (including for customizations). Also it seems 
>> to me that reverse generation would require recursion.
>> 
>> In terms of the HTML-to-wiki approach, it seems to me that in principle 
>> adding a couple of columns to the Markup structure for deterministic 
>> "reverse" markup holds some promise.
>
>Except I'm not sure it's deterministic.  At any rate, I think that
>the only way to make the HTML-to-wiki approach work well would be
>to co-develop the WYSIWYG editor along with the wiki markup (i.e.,
>existing editors such as FCKEditor aren't going to be structured
>in a way to facilitate customization).

I think there is a third option: use a wiki-oriented semantic XML
language, that can be transformed to other kinds of XML, including
XHTML, DocBook, ODF, Wikibook, etc. It is not obvious to me that
HTML is the best language to use. For example, pmwiki markup 
includes the semantics for figures and captions -- a semantic idea
that can be implemented in HTML in many different ways, as HTML
does not have the idea of a figure and its caption.

One of the most powerful design features of pmwiki is that it is
markup-agnostic -- it supports a choice of input and output markup.
I can see a number of benefits to having a browser-based WYSIWYG
editor that can be used with any number of XML specifications,
not just HTML.

The advantage of using a purpose-developed XML specification is 
that it can be made deterministic by design. It's also extensible 
by design, whereas the only extension one can do in XHTML is with
style classes.

><snip>

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin







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