Notes from a technical session at Wikimania on WYSIWYG. Christoph Sauer questions if WYSIWYG is a good thing, based on his experience with a wiki within his technical university in Germany and creating Document Production: Visual or Logical (pdf). Visual is what you see is what you get, Logical is what you see is what you mean. A Canadian study, with 4th grade students showed the biggest issue (49%) was link creation and management (understanding hypertext). Wiki Markup cons:
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* "This is not for me," or people have to learn how to use it. They just know Word. There is no explorative usage.
* "Text processing of the old days." A "sea of monospaced letters," losing overview in simple text editors
* "Wiki markup mess" or no standard for markup
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* Concentrating onthe content. For the author a clean seperaation of layout and content, no typographical errors.
* Context sensitive display: reader and designer have homogeneous design.
* Speed. The tool for knowledge workers, e.g. bloggers don't lose the "flow" No time for formatting.
* Simplicity. Allows easy evolving of wikis, e.g. scripting.He gives a demo of an editor that is like the Wikitext mode of Wikiwyg. You can use familiar tool bars to add formatting, and you see the commands to do so, so people learn Wikitext as they use. But it also formats on the fly like WYSIWYG mode. It also has a table editor and a outline view. Suggests standardizing on three image sizes for image uploads. (Someone asked about adding license info for images, I suggested looking at Greg Elin's WikiMarkupStandard.
I can't really disagree with Chris' findings. Ingy once called WYSIWYG within Wikiwyg "training wheels." I like WikiWizard's dynamic display, but wonder how big of a payload it is and think it needs more editing modes to be usable. Our
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