[Imc-alternatives] User Stories: Wikis or Wysiwygs?

[John Milton]

If there is any interest in offering a BBCode type of option i.e. a 
pseudo-html markup language for formating I wrote a simple parser for 
such a while ago. its pure php >= 4.3 object style code and produces 
what I think is fairly robust html i.e. will pass an XML validator, auto 
closes tag pairs left open by the user so that while a post may be 
"ugly" it won't spill its formating outside of a div box i.e. it wont 
let the user break the layout of a page. has "right to left" tag for 
Hebrew, Arabic, Persian language posts. Sanitises all user supplied html 
i.e. presents it in human readable form in it's output so you can write 
a post showing someone how to code in html but not run a java malware or 
XSS attack on their browser, etc.

No idea what would be involved in making it a Drupal thingy since I've 
never gone there

Assumes the output HTML will be in UTF-8 char. set which I assume is 
what we want for multi-language support and is Drupals default AFAIK.

Anyways if there is interest in that let me know...

Dave Fregon wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 17:52 -0400, Aaron Kreider wrote:
> 
>>The user stories refer to "wikis".  I think we should use WYSIWYG (What 
>>you see is what you get) editors instead.  For an example of WYSIWYG you 
>>can see our openplans site and how you have the ability to change text 
>>format by clicking on "B" and selecting text to make it bold.
>>
>>Drupal has a module that does this: TinyMCE  
>>(http://drupal.org/project/tinymce).
>>
>>Drupal lets you choose multiple modes.  So you could have text, html and 
>>wysiwyg and let users choose which one is their default.  I'd suggest 
>>starting off regular users using wysiwyg as default.
>>
>>Both wiki format and html codes are a little bit too complex and 
>>unfamiliar for the average user. Whereas WYSIWYG imitates the most 
>>familiar conventions that are used by word processing programs and other 
>>software.
>>
>>Do people agree with me on this? It'd be particularly useful to hear 
>>from people who have experience in this area (mine is limited).  What do 
>>regular (non-techie) users prefer?
> 
> 
> ok I have to chime in here :)
> 
> WYSIWYG can be good and bad, it's finding the middle-ground.
> 
> Having handed out a lot of WYSIWYG sites, only to have 20 title colours
> on one page, 3 font sizes and no consistency to a template provided, I
> have to say that some things are good, others are EVIL :) making
> something bold can be good, giving users the ability to make all the
> text underlined and pink is not :) (nothing against pink, just not as
> text;)
> 
> HTML is a medium that has limits, and when you get into this area, I
> have found from a techie perspective you can spend a huge amount of
> support time helping a user align tables and images in a wysiwyg editor,
> because 'I can do it in word, why can't I cut and paste that in
> here?' .. it adds to the work, and detracts from the work to be done as
> well.
> 
> Depending on what it's being used for I guess .. and what the users have
> exposure to actually do with it.
> 
> I have tended to fall back lately on larger projects I am doing to
> defining a template, and have the user fill out plain text fields to
> populate it. OR, limiting the WYSIWYG editor to only allowing certain
> markup, and having the 'style' predefined in css (eg: headings) so they
> don't 'break out' of the sites style.
> 
> my 2 cents, couldn't help it as WYSIWYG support gives us a lot of pain
> at werk :)
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> 
>>Aaron
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Imc-alternatives mailing list
>>Imc-alternatives at lists.indymedia.org
>>http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-alternatives

-- 
Peace: John Milton

email: john at johnmilton.ca
Skype name (VoIP): john.e.milton
mobile phone (Canada): 905-537-8472
web: johnmilton.ca

Encrypted email welcome. PGP key on my website
Fingerprint: 40D8 5835 7230 8EE1 E968  1E7A 5CF1 68A6 C0E2 F9DC