On 08/03/2012 07:46 AM, Benoit Jacob wrote:
2012/8/3 Sheppy <[email protected]>
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.
It's really just about convenience to type, for example,
<a href="otherpage.html">foo</a>
vs
[[otherpage|foo]]
In other words, while HTML is universally known, it isn't convenience to
type text documents in; mediawiki is.
As is restructured text and markdown and...
Personally, I cringe every time I have to edit a mediawiki page with
anything more than trivial markup. I don't like mediawiki syntax and
there seems to be a huge divide on this that I'm not trying to fan the
fires on, just voicing that there's many opinions and not all of them
are: "mediawiki is standard and/or i like it therefore it is good".
I would love a way to edit via restructured text or markdown or some
convenient markdown language I consider better than mediawiki, but I
don't expect everyone to come together or agree on what this is. If it
were just a one-way edit, this would be pretty easy: everyone could have
a translator to go from mediawiki or ReST or markdown -> HTML configured
via preference.
However, how do you reverse the stored format to the user's format? This
is hard. There are possible solutions there, but they're more a matter
of policy and getting people to agree than coding.
I would argue HTML is a good, or even great, backing format. It's what
mozilla does. It is a real standard. There are a plethora of tools to
deal with HTML documents. It is very malleable. There is a clear DOM
translation to its markup.
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.
Even just minimal basic support for some mediawiki markup would make it
more convenient for me to type documents in, than to have to type in HTML
or use a WYSIWYG editor.
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. :)
Nah, I don't read mailing lists carefully enough and I don't contribute
much to MDN, so this only speaks of my own ignorance.
Thanks for taking care of MDN!
Benoit
Eric Shepherd
Developer Documentation Lead
Mozilla
http://www.bitstampede.com/
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