On 02/05/11 18:15, Roan Kattouw wrote: > While I'm sure this particular bug has been fixed, it sounds like the > underlying problem remains. FCKeditor seems to be converting wikitext > to HTML, let users edit the HTML, then convert the HTML back to > wikitext. The bugs would then result from the fact that the > wikitext->HTML->wikitext round-trip (or wikitext->whatever internal > representation is used->wikitext) isn't clean. > > Trevor and I talked about this issue about a year and a half ago, and > figured the best way around round-trip bugs was to not do round-trips > at all. Instead, wikitext or something close to it should be used as > an internal representation, and/or only the parts of the page the user > touches should actually change.
What about using a kind of document tree representation of wikitext? You could have an intermediate representation which precisely represents all of the source wikitext, but was easy to convert to displayable HTML. Kind of like HTML, but annotated to show which of the multiple options for HTML to wikitext transformation should be chosen on the return trip in order to preserve unchanged wikitext precisely. That's what Wikia's editor does. It uses a subclass of the core MediaWiki parser to generate HTML-like output which is richly annotated with comments and custom attributes, allowing precise round-trip transformation of unchanged text. The client side is not a generic HTML editor, rather it responds to UI events by editing the intermediate DOM representation, using code which is aware of the special structure of that document tree. Maybe there are remaining round-trip bugs, but there's no obvious reason why they couldn't be fixed using this general approach. > So that's what I know about the issues when introducing FCKeditor to > an existing wikitext 'codebase'. I hear it's fairly decent when used > from the start, but I'm not familiar enough with it to comment on > that. That's not what I hear. I hear that there were some teething problems, especially related to round-trip conversion, but that those were sorted out long ago. By the way, it's not FCKEditor. The server side seems to have been rewritten from scratch by Wikia, and the client side has been extended and patched. RTE is probably a good name for it, since that's what they call it. If you want to know more, this appears to be the relevant code: https://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/extensions/wikia/RTE/ -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
