> While I personally don't understand some people's fascination with MediaWiki > syntax (I can't stand it, myself), I know this is a Big Deal to some people.
Let me try to help you understand. It's not an issue of being "fascinated" with MediaWiki syntax. (I think markdown would be even better than MediaWiki syntax, myself.) The issue, from my perspective, is that HTML is a horrible wiki markup language, especially because our rich-text editor generates bad HTML. (Fixing the rich-text editor to generate beautiful code would be Hard, if not impossible.) The source for MDN is /ugly/. * "<a href="/en/HTML/HTML5" title="en/HTML/HTML5">main HTML5 page</a>". Why must we repeat the href in the link title in every single link? * Useless <p> </p> [1], <div style="width: auto;">'s [2] scattered around for no reason. * No whitespace between paragraphs, which makes the text impossible to scan. (Whitespace between paragraphs is enforced by every wiki syntax I've ever seen, and I see no whitespace between any paragraphs in the MDN source, anywhere. In fact, I think the old wiki stripped it out.) * < and > instead of < and > in code. This makes reading and writing HTML examples particularly unpleasant. (Even if there is a special hack in MDN to make < and > work inside code blocks, none of the pages I looked at use it, which means the reading experience is still affected.) I could go on, and I'd be happy to if you still don't understand why I feel that the plain-text editing experience in MDN is awful enough that it's holding the wiki back from becoming great. You've said yourself that you edit MDN primarily using the rich text editor and rarely edit the source, so I don't understand why you feel strongly about this. I think perhaps if you tried to use the plain-text editor for a week, you too might discover some of its limitations. Now, maybe your argument would be that everyone else should use the rich text editor like you do, because it's an obviously-superior experience. In that case, I'd suggest you just remove the ability to edit the source directly, since there's no point in offering a second-rate editing experience. But I think that would belie a fundamental misunderstanding of your audience. It's the Mozilla /Developer/ Network. Most of us produce machine-parsed text of some form, by hand, in a plain-text editor, many hours a day. Plain text is our chosen method of technical communication. It's hard for us to get the rich-text editor to do what we want, and anyway, doing so requires using the mouse (or leaning new keyboard shortcuts, if the MDN rich-text editor has those?). We're HTML programmers who would be ashamed to write such ugly HTML and can't stand reading it. Anyway we are certainly no less technically inclined than the average Wikipedia editor, so would have no trouble with whatever actual Wiki syntax you chose. Surely you wouldn't suggest that a rich-text editor like FrontPage is a good tool for developers of all skill levels to use when they edit HTML. So I hope we can agree that the MDN rich text editor is not a good tool for everyone. I understand that this seems like a bikeshed. I'm a grumpy programmer with an opinion. But I don't think this is a trivial issue. After the stability issues, which perhaps are now fixed, the HTML ugliness is the primary reason I avoid MDN at all costs. It sounds like I'm not alone. Do you often hear people say they're drawn to MDN because of the awesome plain-text editing experience? If not, on what basis do you make the argument that the plain-text editing experience on MDN is better than it would be under a different syntax regime? Conversely, do you often hear programmers complain that Github uses Markdown instead of HTML? Surely if HTML was right for MDN, it would be right for Github bug reports too. Why aren't more sites for developers following MDN's lead and using HTML for user-generated content, do you think? Is it your view that they are all misguided, or otherwise misunderstand their audience? > That said, we know that there are people that prefer MediaWiki and we'll see > if we can find a way to let people use some kind of tool that lets them paste > MediaWiki syntax in and get it automatically converted into HTML. Editing is an important function of a wiki, so this would be pretty unsatisfying. I agree with the implicit argument here that a lossless HTML <--> MediaWiki (or whatever) translator would be difficult, and since it would have to push all of the ugliness present in MDN's existing HTML into the resultant MediaWiki text, I'm not convinced the result would be a big improvement. So long as HTML is the canonical language, I do not think we are going to solve this problem. We're on the same side here: We both want MDN to be great. Even if I haven't convinced you, I hope I've made clear the argument against how things are now. -Justin [1] https://developer-new.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/HTML5/Introduction_to_HTML5$edit [2] https://developer-new.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array$edit On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 8:31 AM, Sheppy <[email protected]> wrote: > On Friday, August 3, 2012 12:02:10 AM UTC-4, Benoit Jacob wrote: > > >> The #1 problem for many people with the current MDN wiki was that it didn't >> offer mediawiki-compatible markup editing. It would be great to be able to >> use right away one's familiarity with mediawiki markup (which is what most >> people know), and of course being able to copy and paste contents to/from >> mediawikis would be a huge benefit of that. Will the new wiki system offer >> that? Sorry, I hadn't heard of Kuma and a google search for Kuma Wiki >> didn't return useful results. > > Kuma continues to use HTML as its markup language; this is a > universally-known standard that we think makes sense. Switching back to > MediaWiki markup was not a viable option after years of using standard HTML. > > While I personally don't understand some people's fascination with MediaWiki > syntax (I can't stand it, myself), I know this is a Big Deal to some people. > > Unfortunately, there was no way to satisfy everyone, and we had to make a > decision. In the end, for both technical and social reasons (more people know > and like HTML than MediaWiki syntax -- indeed, I bet you know HTML yourself), > it just made more sense to use HTML. > > That said, we know that there are people that prefer MediaWiki and we'll see > if we can find a way to let people use some kind of tool that lets them paste > MediaWiki syntax in and get it automatically converted into HTML. But that's > not going to happen right away, since there are still some more fundamental > site features we need to work on. > > I know this is frustrating to some people that prefer MediaWiki syntax, and > we'll see what we can do. I just can't make any promises, and obviously > anything we do manage to do won't be the same as a raw MediaWiki setup. > > I'm surprised you hadn't heard of Kuma; we've been talking about it at length > for over a year, including posts to this very mailing list asking for people > to help us test it. This makes me feel sad since we worked so hard to get the > word out. :) > > Eric Shepherd > Developer Documentation Lead > Mozilla > http://www.bitstampede.com/ > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
