[OWW-SC] EditTools helper enabled (Greek characters, etc).

[Bill F]

As I said in my message, I am not advocating, I'm just looking into
how we can do it.

I agree re: Wikipedia's implementation of MediaWiki; it's almost
impossible to represent text from there in other systems because of
complex style sheets and their byzantine templating system. I don't
want to add to the complexity for the sake of complexity. Take a look
at any of the more well-edited pages on Wikipedia. They're thick with
nested templates that are incredibly hard to unwind.

Part of the reason Wikipedia has this problem is because of the
article review process. A relatively small number of editors police
all the documents in their domain, reformatting them to  use the
templates they design, independent in many cases of other similar
templates in the system.

The reason I've put forward the linking syntax is because it's
literally part of MediaWiki already and in use today. In most cases,
the tags used are legible even if not displayed with the extension.

I'm trying to respond to as many people as possible in doing what I've
done so far. We can add and delete these capablities to make it work
well for all.

I do appreciate all of the comments. I'm doing my best to internalize
all of them as I work.


B.



On Nov 13, 2007 10:56 AM, Julius B. Lucks <julius at younglucks.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I've incuded a few shortcuts for frequently requested symbols as
> >> well:
> >>
> >> degc: °C
> >> degf: °F
> >> mu: μ
> >> lambda:λ
> >>
> >> These symbols may be awkward to use. The benefit is in not having to
> >> use the panel at the base of the page to enter symbols.
> >
> >     I don't like this approach of having random text to mean something
> >     else just to save typing. If the extension is ever uninstalled or
> >     for anyone who gets a data dump, they'll have a bunch of macros
> >     without knowing what those macros should be expanded to. It's the
> >     same with interwiki links. We have a perfectly good unique way of
> >     referring to pages on the web and replace it with a site-specific
> >     way of naming. Adding a layer of indirection means that to really
> >     get all the content on a page, not only do you need the text of
> >     the page, you need the interwiki link table. With these
> >     'shortcuts', not only will you need the page text, you need the
> >     extensions installed on the site.
>
> I agree with Austin here.  I worked on a small project for OLPC to
> grab slices of wikipedia content once, and it was painful to have to
> do the translation of special syntax, especially templates.  The
> current system also makes it a lot harder to implement client-side
> 'preview'  functionality as part of an off-line editor useful for lab
> notebooks, etc.
>
> Julius
>
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