[Phpwiki-talk] WYSIWIKI

[Dan F. <dfr...@cs...>]

For your fun and enjoyment here is an undergraduate thesis on making 
PhpWiki into a WYSIWIKI:

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~yile0001/thesis.pdf

I am not necessarily recommending this as a plan of action, but I think 
it's good to be exposed to these ideas. I will say that one of my vocal 
users feels WYSIWIKI (without a save button!) would be a huge win. 
Disclosure: I did not write this thesis, but I did work with Scott on 
other things.

Dan

The short story:

- Markup is hard for some
- Markup is ambiguous sometimes (e.g., "*happy days*" produces a bullet 
instead of bold)
- Saving should happen more easily

A trial implementation:

- Bolt a WYSIWIG editor onto the wiki in this case SPAW, 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/spaw
- Save pages in straight HTML so it is a logical, consistent, powerful 
language
- Do it in a way so people don't have to hit an "edit" or "save" button 
anymore (!!). It just auto-saves every few seconds (to the same 
revision, so it doesn't create huge numbers of revisions)

Some limitations to be solved, with proposals for solutions for each:

- Lack of plugin support
- HTML vulnerability