[pmwiki-users] Wither Creole? (pun intended)

[The Editor]

On a related topic (withering wiki projects), whatever happened to wikiwyg.
It looked quite promising at one point but I never could quite get it to
work. Now, I'm searching the internet and it seems to have died. Pretty
much all the link to it are invalid.

I see someone took a stab at it on PmWiki but not much success there. As I
remember it had the nice option of three modes: wysiwyg, markup, and html
and you could alternate between them.

Very challenging for a powerful wiki, but for a comment editor or simple
blog editor or something could be useful to non-Admin content creators...

Cheers,
Dan


On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 3:41 PM Petko Yotov <5ko at 5ko.fr> wrote:

> On 2015-08-11 12:08, Randy Brown wrote:
> > "WikiCreole 1.0 support” is still on PmWiki's roadmap. But do any
> > PmWiki developers actually offer or encourage the use of Creole?
>
> I don't use Creole and I neither encourage nor discourage the use of it.
> :-) But I would prefer people to use PmWiki markup, as it is better
> tested and known, and thus easier for me to help them.
>
> There was never question to change PmWiki to Creole-only markups. Creole
> markups can be added to PmWiki without disabling core markups.
>
> > I use it and I’d like to see it succeed, but if the Creole ship is
> > slowly sinking, I don’t want to throw more luggage on board.
>
> That project was started when wikis were very popular as a very easy way
> to publish for the web. Before wikis, one would have to write HTML. Wiki
> markup is much, much easier to learn than HTML and to use, and the
> automatic organization (links) and easy monitoring (recent changes) are
> great for community-driven websites.
>
> WikiCreole questioned the choices of different existing wiki markup and
> tried to find the best compromise to unify them. This took a long time.
>
> I am not aware of any wiki that stopped using their original markup
> rules and started using WikiCreole.
>
> > What do you think? Does it have a future? I don’t hear much about it
> > anymore.
>
> The question should probably be if wikis as they currently are have a
> future for novice users, see below.
>
> > Some plusses:
> >
> > - its similarity to other wiki markup languages,
> > - its use of backslashes mid-line to make a line break, and
> > - its non-use of apostrophes as markup
>
> The apostrophe key is present on my touch-screen keyboards in the
> "letters" layouts, and neither / nor * are. I feel that it is easier to:
>
>     type 3 apostrophes then the bold text, then 3 apostrophes
>
> than to:
>
>    switch the layout to numbers/symbols, type two asterisks,
>    then switch back the layout to letters,
>    type the bold text,
>    switch the layout to numbers/symbols, type two asterisks,
>    then switch back the letters.
>
> (or: switch the layout, type ****, try to position the cursor at the
> middle, switch the layout, type bold text, position the cursor at the
> end.)
>
> > Some minuses:
> >
> > - asterisks and equal signs, like brackets, can be hard to type on a
> > touchscreen device. But that’s somewhat counterbalanced by the fact
> > that positioning the cursor between two apostrophes can be hard, and
> > visually two of them look just like a double quote - especially to
> > beginners.
>
> This is correct, it is also sometimes difficult to correctly position
> the cursor where you want even between larger characters, especially if
> your fingers are big.
>
> On a touch-screen device, it is also more difficult to select text and
> help yourself inserting markup with the edit toolbar, and to scroll
> within the scrollable text area when the content is larger.
>
> > - PmWiki’s documentation is not in Creole, so that can be confusing.
>
> If you really need this, you can write it yourself. Creole has a tiny
> tiny subset of the features possible with PmWiki, so it doesn't need
> dozens of documentation pages - probably one page will be enough. And
> Site.EditQuickReference.
>
>
> > What would you do if you were starting a new wiki for novice users?
> > Enable Creole? Encourage it? Discourage it?
>
> I feel that unfortunately novice users are preoccupied with a huge
> number of other things more important than learning wiki markup. Unless
> they use it daily or at least once a week, they forget the markup rules
> and have to re-learn them.
>
> Novice users have two publishing experiences:
> - text processors on a desktop computer, where they get what they see,
> but which is terrible in a browser, cross-browser and cross-device, and
> which is terrible to store and index in a text-based CMS like PmWiki;
> - SMS, and social media websites or apps, where they enter plain text
> but in very small input boxes, so again they see what they get, as only
> a tiny element of the page is updated after their action, in real time.
>
> I've been observing for a year a large wiki community which tries to
> welcome newcomers but the wiki markup, and the editing really more
> adapted for a physical keyboard, is something that scares the users. On
> the other hand, advanced users sometimes abuse the wikimarkup, adding
> too many things like bold + big + wikistyle on a single heading,
> sometimes advanced tables for presentation, which makes the page hardly
> readable for me, and even more scary for a novice user.
>
> I don't have a solution, but I mentioned I'm working on a structured
> page editor, not completely WYSIWYG but close enough for the most often
> used types of content. We'll see if it helps novice users in a few
> weeks.
>
> Petko
>
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