[pmwiki-users] wysiwyg editor for wiki

[Henrik Bechmann]

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?).

------------------------

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.

Obviously both have issues. In terms of the former, identifying minimal 
scope for translation (I personally think the performance issue is 
manageable); 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.

-------------------------

IAC, of this I am quite sure: you Patrick are an unparalleled master of 
regex conversions. If anyone could solve this problem, you could. 
Perhaps partnering with Google?

Just food for thought...

- Henrik

Henrik Bechmann
www.osscommons.ca
www.bechmannsoftware.com
Webmaster, www.dufferinpark.ca



Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 02:04:58PM -0400, Henrik Bechmann wrote:
>   
>> There's an intriguing article on Wikipedia about the possibility of 
>> using FCKEditor or TinyMCE as WYSIWYG editors for WikiMedia (and 
>> presumably with modification for PmWiki):
>>
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor
>>
>> Does anyone have the background with these editors, and with PmWiki, to 
>> evaluate the merit of this project for PmWiki?
>>     
>
> I'd have to wait and see how far they're able to get with it
> for MediaWiki.  
>
> However, I think that a very strong indicator of the difficulty
> of the problem is that it hasn't been done yet, despite a large
> demand.  And keep in mind that since WikiMedia doesn't have nearly
> the range of markup customization that PmWiki does, doing a good
> WYSIWYG for PmWiki would be a lot harder (or require severe
> restrictions on the range of customizations available).
>
> This topic came up about four months ago; here's the message I
> posted then (and its related thread).
>
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/25565/focus=25641
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Pm
>
>
>