D Wiki

[BCS]

Hello Yigal,

> BCS wrote:
>
>> One major *advantage* of wikies is that the UI is a browser. If I
>> need to install anything (even a plugin, and lets pretend I don't
>> have flash already) I'm not going to be contributing anything.
>> 
> no. wikies are text based and have *NO* UI.

No, I understand how wikies work, you use a web browser to edit text content 
that is then rendered as HTML. The UI is implemented via a web server and 
a web browser. Saying it has no UI is nonsensical as clearly the system interfaces 
with a user so it /must/ have a UI of some kind.

> the flash widget was, as you said, "if all else fails" and we do not
> need to go to that extreme.

I hope your right there.

> why is a standards based rich text editor so hard to envision?

Envision? Easy. Implement? Hard. Heck, it's not that easy to do even under 
something like winforms.

> are we
> considering supporting all browsers since explorer 1.0 and that's why
> it's so hard?

I'm with you on that one.

> IMO, this is doable. I am able to compose rich text messages in gmail
> without the need to learn some obscure wiki format. so maybe gmail
> doesn't provide support for all possible combinations of html tags but
> neither is the wiki format.
> 
> all i'm trying to say is that it's more productive IMO to try to fix
> the few problems that the current rich text editors have (according to
> other people's replies) than to give up and just use the wrong design.

In general, you may be correct, but for programmers, the cost of using non 
WYSIWYG is a lot smaller as we tend to be more practiced at reading around 
markup of different kinds and the cost of WYSIWYG (loss of flexibility) is 
much more noticeable because we tend to know and use more of the things that 
get lost.