[pmwiki-users] wysiwyg editor for wiki

[Joachim Durchholz]

DrFredC.com schrieb:
> That being said, one thing that concerns me about online wysiwygs is 
> overhead.  While many in the metro world operate on high speed, there's 
> still a fair amount of dialup accounts out there, particularly in rural 
> areas.

That's definitely a factor - these Javascript editors have quite a lot 
of files to download.

 > There's also potentially a lot of server overhead operating an
> online wysiwyg editor for a busy wiki. 

That's essentially a program download, i.e. stuffing the script files 
into the network line. That's an I/O-bound task, not enough to saturate 
the CPU or memory.
Even better, the browser will keep the files in its cache, so they need 
be sent only once in a while (or after an upgrade).
IOW the server will get an occasional network load spike from that, but 
nothing to really worry about.

> Perhaps the (best?) option might be to develop a wysiwyg editor that 
> wiki/editors might download (perhaps for free, or a modest price or by 
> webmaster approval) that would allow 'editors' to edit online at their 
> local site using the downloaded webware. 

It could also be packed into an archive, making the download even faster.
The downside is that you'd need to write an installer for every OS. And 
you'd lose the typical "you can use this from everywhere without any 
setup" flair of a wiki. That's not a factor in every use case, but it 
narrows the potential audience a bit.

> I suppose it's also possible such a wysiwyg editor might be configured 
> to seamlessly provide an additional layer of 'security' so that only 
> approved folks (like subscribers?) could edit the wiki, or some section 
> of a wiki. 

Only if you force edits to go through the editor. (And even then you 
can't be sure that the editor wasn't hacked - which is nearly 
impossible, and an arms race against the hacker, so there better be 
longterm backing behind the editor project.)
Anyway, this approach would be incompatible with making the editor optional.

Regards,
Jo