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WYSIWYG editor

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You may be looking for the rich-text editor, VisualEditor. See VisualEditor:Test to try it.

Regular Wiki markup is a simple way of formatting a wiki page but many would-be users of MediaWiki are put off by any coding of any sort. These users are used to publishing and editing in a more visually straightforward WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment.

WYSIWYG and MediaWiki software

For a list of existing extensions providing some degree of WYSIWYG support, see Category:WYSIWYG extensions.

In 2009, there was no available 'ready-to-go' package for incorporating full WYSIWYG into the MediaWiki software.

The problem is that any WYSIWYG editor would have to know wikitext grammar, and no full grammar for wikitext exists — the "parser" doesn't parse, it's a twisty series of regular expressions. So present WYSIWYG editors either have to perform one of the following:

  • Reverse-engineer as much grammar as they can
  • Forget wikitext and just write HTML.

A proper grammar is not sufficient for a proper WYSIWYM editor, as opposed to WYSIAYG (what you see is all you get), but it is necessary. A proper grammar is a highly-desired thing for many other purposes as well, and present efforts are at "promising vapourware" status. See Markup spec.

Design

Conceptual

As noted hereinbefore, HTML TEXTAREAS could be a fallback for older browsers or those that prefer this for fine control. The WYSIWYG editor could also be limited to reflect only existing wiki markup, with its democratically decided simplicities and compromises for complexities — adding nothing to the wiki markup, only providing a more visually straightforward means of changing the markup....

Implementation

There are a few options for making a WYSIWYG editor that works in the browser.

  1. Pure DHTML/JavaScript. Capture mouse input, buttons, keystrokes, etc., and actually edit the HTML of the current document. It's not trivial, but possible.
  2. Create a custom browser plug-in, Java applet, ActiveX control. This would probably be workable, but would take quite a bit of hackery, and may or may not work. Requiring users to install any sort of plugin is very undesirable.
    Imho, limited approach. Only Java applet is (possibly) cross-browser compatible. But not all users have Java on their machines and JavaScript is supported by all popular browsers (well, maybe except text-based, but I think that Java wouldn't work there too)... --Shtriter 07:20, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Users using text based browsers don't matter for WYSIWIG. They are going to be happier editing in Creole --Kevin Holzer (see hlzr.net for contact) 12:38, g29 December 2010 (PST)
  3. Both Mozilla and Internet Explorer have included ways to make sections of a page editable. IE 5.5 had the MSHTML Editing Platform (archive.org), and Mozilla has its Rich Text Editing API. Both technologies allow Web developers to make parts of a page editable -- in slightly different ways, of course.

Most current in-browser WYSIWYG editors use the third option.

Proof of concept: WYSIWYG editors

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TinyMCE

Extension:TinyMCE (successor to the now-unmaintained, Extension:TinyMCE MW) lets users edit wiki pages using the popular open source JavaScript-based WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE.

Mozile

Mozile takes a different approach to editing, using DOM operations instead of the designMode features which most other editors rely on. It also supports structured editing based on RelaxNG. A MediaWiki editing demo is available which makes use of the html2wiki.xsl tool mentioned below.

Oracle Wiki Publisher for OpenOffice

Runs in the open source, free office suite OpenOffice versions 3 and higher. OpenOffice runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and is an alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite. The Oracle Wiki Publisher extension currently allows one to edit and export wiki pages after editing them like any other document in OpenOffice. Like most of these editors, it produces some ugly syntax though.

Wikizzle

No longer maintained.

While not providing true WYSIWYG (editing is done directly to wikitext), Wikizzle includes AJAX WYSIWYM editing features similar in purpose to WYSIWYG such as real-time rendering of the article. Runs in Mozilla.

Other Wiki engines/services that have WYSIWYG

Try out the editing feature on these sites, for some inspiration:

Other wiki engines / services that have WYSIWYG

HTML to wiki markup

Leveraging the power of existing html editing/spell checking tools makes it necessary to convert the produced HTML/XHTML to wiki markup.

If we manage to create a python or php script that converts simplified tidy output (xhtml) to wiki-code, this would be easy to do with epoz. Epoz 0.74 feeds the html through tidy on the server via xml-rpc when switching to source view and on save. This works great, it's Plone's standard editor — I used it to write the Squid document for example. Our conversion script can hook in after tidy, the source visible in 'source view' and submitted to the server would be wiki markup. All without reloading the surrounding page. Creating the conversion script is a challenge, but operating on tidy-cleaned xhtml should simplify matters. Epoz only allows structural markup (no font tags etc), so this is mainly a str_replace(). With the appropriate configuration tidy will strip the complex things first.

This setup combines the advantages of both worlds by providing two views switchable back and forth without reloading the page:

  • WYSIWYG view: uses the default CSS and HTML editing
  • SOURCE view: wiki source
That's great! But I wonder again, why only server-side scripts? I believe that it would be better to do it on client-side and let the user to switch between the views dynamically. There is already very limited but working prototype for it. For further information - contact me. --Shtriter 07:20, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Advantages:

  • XSLT can be used client-side by most modern browsers.
  • The resulting wiki markup can be submitted as if it came from an HTML textarea.

Disadvantages:

  • Much of the white space information is lost during parsing and the XSL transformation.
  • The current MediaWiki parser does not provide enough information about templates and other generated content in an article's HTML.

Any HTML to wiki markup conversion tool will need more information about the generated content than the MediaWiki parser currently includes in the HTML which it generates. Otherwise it will have to interpret templates as normal content, for example, when they should be converted to the {{Template}} syntax. The most direct solution to this problem is to make the parser include more information. In large part this would simply require better use of the "class" attribute. Sometimes it would require adding elements to wrap the generated content.

Proposed changes to the parser:

  • The ‎<nowiki> tag should become 
    <p class="nowiki">
    .
  • Container ‎<div> elements for images should distinguish between the "thumb" class for thumbnails and the "frame" class for frames, even if the CSS for the two classes is the same. The containers for scaled images (those with their size property set) should be marked with a "scaled" class.
  • Templates (but not nested templates) need to be marked as such in the HTML.
{{Template name}}

should become 

<span class="template">
  <span class="template-name">Template name</span>
  Expanded template...
</span>

The "template-name" class can be marked as display: none in CSS.

  • References need to include their content at the reference point.
<ref>Reference content.</ref>

should become 

<sup class="reference">
  <span class="reference-content">Reference content.</span>
  Reference links and number...
</span>

The "reference-content" class can be marked as display: none in CSS.

  • Category links need to be included in the HTML.
[[Category:Category name]]

should become 

<span class="category-link">Category name</span>

The "category-link" class can be marked as display: none in CSS.

The use of new elements with CSS display: none is in the spirit of adding semantic structure. It would be possible to use comment tags instead, in order to provide better support for legacy browsers.

Possible problems

Things which need to be worked around include:

  1. One of the most important features of wiki is the links from one page to another page. The primitive HTML textarea system, after an editor has learned its cryptic markup, makes linking (relatively) quick and easy to edit. Most (all?) WYSIWYG editors make linking (relatively) slow and difficult to edit. Switching to an editor that makes common operations more difficult is a step backwards.
  2. An editor should support the user in getting a headline right instead of using a big font, marking a citation instead of italicizing text, and so on. Imho most wysiwyg-editors lures people away from thinking about the meaning, and this is wrong. -- ∂ 01:47, 6 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Displaying differences between italics and emphasis, bold and strong emphasis. Italics and bold are only used for articles on typesetting. (Technically mathematical formulae should use ‎<var> or ‎<math> but probably people are using ‎<i> as it is shorter.)
    Mediawiki originally interpreted double apostrophes as emphasis and triple apostrophes as strong, but this has been changed to italics and bold. We should probably get the developers to make up their minds before we start worrying about how a WYSIWYG editor implements it... — Omegatron 22:04, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Displaying formulae and potentially also music, maps, timelines, chess... allow editing?
    Perhaps MathML supporting browsers will be able to edit formulae
    There is ajax Math Preview. The source code was here (aluno.no-ip.info/juca/mw-AjaxMathPreview-idea.diff). For more info - google in Mediawiki-l maillist. --Shtriter 07:19, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Displaying templates and allowing editing and inclusion of templates
    What about protected templates in a non-protected page? (Other similar combinations...)
    I have an idea. It would show up as a square box with the template name inside, and upon double-clicking a new tab would open (between the text box and formatting buttons) and allow editing of that template. This is a bit like handling of OLE objects in Microsoft Office.
    I'm working over it on w:User:Pilaf/InstaView/Devel --Shtriter 07:19, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Allow easy input other tags such as strikethrough, often used off the article namespace?
    No problem. FCKeditor even allows to insert images without any difficulties!
    Or do you want the delete tag? Maybe we could restrict which buttons were displayed in which namespace to discourage certain tags from being used in the main article namespace? — Omegatron 22:11, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Displaying category links, interlanguage links?
    Same as MW do? I'm working over it on w:User:Pilaf/InstaView/Devel --Shtriter 07:19, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Over-use of color, size, and other features. See MySpace.com profiles for examples of people with no design knowlege let loose.
    Any suggestions? Prohibit color editing? Or at list for not registered users? --Shtriter 07:19, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
    Seriously. As soon as we implement this the site will turn into Myspace if we don't limit what the interface can do. It should only be capable of the things that the standard toolbar is capable of. Users shouldn't be allowed to change fonts, colors or create big bold text for headers, for instance. If they want to do things like that for special cases, they should be forced to use the source code editor. — Omegatron 22:08, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Issues with users cutting and pasting from word processing software especially Microsoft Word. This results in non-compliant HTML and could be rendered incorrectly (if at all) from non microsoft platforms.
    We can have it strip anything except basic markup, but we'd have to incorporate a list in the software to indicate what "basic" means. — Omegatron 22:09, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  10. Has anyone else noticed that the fckeditor extension is not usable with any version of PHP after 5.2.5? (running Wampserver 2.0)...
    I had no problem installing Extension:WYSIWYG on a local XAMPP server under Windows. The WYSIWYG editor works fine in Firefox 5. However, the corporate-installed IE7 blanked out pages that contained certain markup when using WYSIWYG. I didn't have time to figure out which cookie or security settings were needed to fix this. Workaround: If you are using WYSIWYG in IE7, add a step to select the contents of the text area and copy it into your clipboard before you save, just in case the page blanks out. If the page blanks out when you save, open the page for editing, paste the contents of your clipboard and save it again.

Wikipedia WYSIWYG editors not running inside the browser

Other text editors are covered in Wikipedia:Text editor support, too.

See

Problems with WYSIWYG

Mediawiki extensions

  • Extension:VisualEditor - A new concept of an WYSIWYG editor for use with MediaWiki. Still experimental, but under development targeted for the 2nd half of 2012

Non-web-based editors

  • Diderot - Demo for integrated Wikipedia editor - Windows only
  • Gwennel Web - a WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM editor for Windows.

Web-based WYSIWYG editor components

Other wikis with WYSIWYG

  • MindTouch Deki Wiki XHTML wiki with WYSIWYG.
  • WIKIWIG --A lite WYSIWYG Wiki based on HtmlArea3. GPL, developed in PHP, so lite and easy to set up.
  • TWiki an Enterprise Collaboration Platform written in Perl.

WYSIWYG CMS

Miscellaneous

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