[wikipedia.mozdev] Adding WYSIWIG functionality to this extension?

[Michael Keppler]

bent schrieb:
> Are there plans add something in the vein of WYSIWIG functionality to 
> this extension? 

No.

> I have no idea what would be involved in implementing such, or even if 
> it would be something that is in the realm of the possible given need to 
> render/write/integrate MediaWiki markup, but wanted to post somewhere to 
> express some user interest since it doesn't look like a WYSI editor is 
> going to be incorporated into MediaWiki too soon.
> 
> For what it's worth, there's a cool extension that adds some WYSIWIG to 
> Yahoo Mail at http://patsis.brownhost.com/extxpi.html#ewebmail .  It has 
> a simple table editor, which IMHFO is maybe the most needed WYSI 
> functionality for Wikipedia.  Simple text markup doesn't scare people 
> too bad, but editing tables' text does.

There has been much discussion about a WYSIWIG tool on the MediaWiki 
developers list, but we can't expect such a tool anytime soon because it 
is too complicated.
In the email extension you just style some HTML content, which is fine, 
cause HTML is the expected result for the mail composition. With a 
WYSIWYG wiki editor this becomes really complicated: The editor would 
also have to use HTML controls for displaying and editing the WYSIWYG 
contents, so the user would be manipulating the content by 
adding/changing html tags and attributes using the formatting buttons. 
But at the same time the extension would need to map those HTML changes 
to wiki markup (somewhere in the background) because that is what the 
wiki servers need as input when submitting a changed article. So the 
extension would need the ability to  fully convert between the wiki 
markup source and the generated HTML output (in both directions!) to 
handle both tasks. This would require to reimplement the MediaWiki 
"parser" (it is no real parser, only a converter) in the extension and 
an additional parser to work the other way around.
If you can provide a solution for this then you can expect a WYSIWYG 
tool for MediaWiki editing, but not before...

Ciao, Michael.