Wysiwyg Wiki Contest

Now that there is a free, commented, ready-made html-form element for Wysiwyg editing (limited to MS Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher, apparently), there is also a challenge for Wiki programmers to use this component for a decent WysiwygWiki.

Download page: http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/index.html#demo

Please leave here your link(s) with timestamps to working public WysiwygWiki(s), based on this component:

(broken as of 6/12/06) http://www.guiki.com/Guiki/ 2004-02-04 (100 line wiki in php from scratch with almost all available htmlform editing tools for testing)
(broken as of 6/12/06) http://piece.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/wysimoin/moin.cgi 2004-01-30 (?? please confirm) (a MoinMoin hack)
http://www.whatisflash.com/index.php?page=WysiWikkiTikkiTavi (The date? Sometime in 2002, I think.) (It's awfully pretty. This particular site is restricted to postings about Flash, but the author says that the engine is available. Also see WysiwygWikkiTikkiTavi.)
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Discussion: Try http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/cms.html This is a Bidirectional Link to http://openwiki.com/ow.asp?OpenWiki%2FSuggestions%2FEditWYSIWYG, where the good news came from. -- FridemarPache

Why this contest:

In a world of a myriad of Wikis with a myriad of ("simplifying") input format conventions on textareas, it is a great simplification to have now a uniform intuitive inputform. Besides that it may really save keystrokes and waiting time between text edit mode and html presentation mode. See DontModeMe. -- fp

You won't exclude textbased Browsers, will you?

You could optionally or conditionally add a textarea. The condition could be saved as a preference cookie. -- fp

Note:

HtmlArea? does graceful degradation, e.g. if no gui or usable javascript-interpreter is available, the user gets a plain textarea instead. Btw. the latest version works in Gecko-based browser too.

I downloaded the 26K file. I could edit the example locally and clicked in edit mode on a link, but it didnt jump.

Solution:

the brutal variant: use a keyboard macro / a bookmarklet to save the modified form (if the modified flag is set) and jump to the new form.
the wiki way: problem still open Dec 15, 2002, 15:12 PST
ask BillGates

Google (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=Wysiwyg+Wiki) shows 4,690 results as of 15/Dec/2002/4:10GMT. -- AndrewMartin (who's also interested in this competition)

Watchlist:

The NaturalHypertextNotebook? of http://www.innovateer.com/products/pepys/ looks promising. You can download a free personal edition, that gives you the taste for the announced groupware. -- fp

One problem is that the wiki has to supply HTML content to the HtmlArea?, and gets back HTML content when the page is submitted. This can be a problem if one is storing plain text (in my case eText), instead of HTML. Of course, one could use XML as a storage medium? Is there an XmlWiki??

-- AndrewMartin

ReiniUrban did initial htmlarea3 support for PhpWiki after doing the guiki port to phpnuke. The problem is indeed the HTML parsing back to wiki formatted text. Once edited with HTMLAREA you can only save and edit it in HTML. Current PhpWiki doesn't ship with htmlarea3 support, because of the possible viral effect and the lack of a parser. Into which format the parser converts the HTML code is not really important (=> WikiExchangeLanguage), unless it can be easily converted to the proprietary WikiFormat for the WikiEngine in question. -- ReiniUrban

Of course, in order to ensure InterWiki operation of the myriads of wikis out there, you need to standardize the interchange language. This though, does not mean you actually need to store XML; you just need to be able to produce it (or whatever else this interchange might require). Another thought is to actually have an editor like lyx produce this interchange data. This then may be posted to the corresponding wiki, where it gets stored any way the wiki wants it. The point being that you have a real editor for your serious WikiWork?. Emacs has a wiki mode which is not really WYSIWYG, but it is close enough. But the wiki-mode produces output for one specific wiki syntax. This renders it basically useless. Is there a WikiExchangeLanguage? If not, maybe the time has come for there to be one. -- DimiterKurtev

PerspectiveWiki uses the HTML editing capabilities of Internet Explorer and converts the HTML produced to nice XML for storage. Any browser-specific HTML idioms are normalized to a common format allowing WYSIWYG editing of the same content from different browsers.

Alain 2004-08-18: Is this contest still on? If so, I have a candidate WYSIWYG wiki editor crafted with Metacard. The latter is a WYSIWYG authoring tool (IDE). With my editor, you do all of the layout, click on a button, and voila ... the output is DHTML (layers, CSS, etc.). I'm now adapting it to also generate wiki markup, and adapting PmWiki to support DHTML, as well as an API that will allow us (authenticated users) to update the wiki remotely (automation).