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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
> bleveck wrote:
> TXP is largely a program for people with some savvy when it comes to web publishing, people who can appreciate some of it’s more innovative features.
I don’t know where you are getting that.
These days I’m working on a project where the main goal is to offer a tool to non webmasters, non geeks people to write and publish articles without even seeing or bothering about an HTML tag. The site admin will care about these when designing the site and configuring TXP, the writers focus on writing good content.
From my point of view, that’s one of the goals of Textile, and that’s the major use of a CMS.
Last edited by Jeremie (2005-01-16 22:15:51)
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Jeremie… If you read my posts above I think you’ll see that I realize there is a difference between content people and web designers
I know you think it is minimal stuff that people should be fine learning, but realize that most people hire web designers and developers because they don’t want to have to deal with any of that stuff, or learn a lot of new web technology. Wysiwyg editors give them an environment they are familiar with.
I was refering to Textpattern as a CMS, which web designers (and other people building sites) like for it’s flexibility. I think that’s apparent in the fact that this forum has a large number of web designers (for the record I am not a web designer).
Textile is focused on abstracting you away from web design in a certain sense. It allows one to type as normally as possible while generating very reliable html. Don’t get me wrong. I think that Textile awesome. I particularly like the fact that it allows me to write in a very intuitive way without worrying that I’m going to have to correct the crap that WYSWIG editors can often produce (and sometimes they cannot rectify their own errors).
My main argument is that while Textile is a very innovative and useful web writing interface (which web designers can perhaps uniquely appreciate), it definitley not for everyone. Why not give people other options? Also because CMS’s do seperate stuff so neatley, as you point out, the bad code wysiwyg’s can produce does less damage. It is limited to a particular document, and only creates a problem for those who manage the site if a tag doesn’t get closed or something.
Last edited by bleveck (2005-01-16 22:47:20)
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
People aren’t “forced to learn” a WYSIWYG – it’s the way that 99% of people learn how to write text on a computer (cue MS Word).
A WYSIWYG would always be optional – nobody wants to eliminate Textile. And i’m just talking about a few buttons at the top, for the basics, like bold, italic, etc.
This is a forum for mostly developers and site admins, but Textpattern isn’t a tool just for the computer-savvy – people who manage content should only be faced with content, not html or code. Yes, Textile is a great way to input text, but it’s not the usual way, and people generally don’t like to learn things that they don’t see as directly related to the task at hand.
It’s not really a question of “why can’t users learn textile” – it’s “why do users have to learn Textile?” I don’t see a technical reason why not, and I see many practical reasons for integrating a WYSIWYG.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
> bleveck wrote:
> it definitley not for everyone.
Who ? Beside the bugs, lack of documentation, total lack of translation, can you show us some people that don’t understand Textile ?
Textile is not perfect, but one thing it is … simple to use.
> Why not give people other options? Also because CMS’s do seperate stuff so neatley, as you point out, the bad code wysiwyg’s can produce does less damage.
No use for a potential wysiwyg tool if it produce bad coding. The whole point of TXP is to produce good semantic HTML. If you could live without semantic HTML, there are zillions of tools outhere that will do ;)
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#17 2005-01-17 00:56:08
- davidm
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- From: Paris, France
- Registered: 2004-04-27
- Posts: 719
Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Whahhh, I see it’s getting passionnate here ;-)
The only thing I am against is preaching “one thing for all”, and everyone is entitled to choose… Once again, for myself I won’t use wysiwyg but Textile, but clients will want something different sometimes and yes, they deserve to know what txp can do for them, and use it, no matter what their position is on Textile vs wysiwyg (!).
I don’t think Dean meant to build a tool for the elite, but as he well put it “A flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites”.
Yes, Textile is really about web publishing while wysiwyg is a port of MS Word to web applications, which clumsily does the job of helping people to publish on the web.
But I remind you that my original idea was not to have a HTML wysiwyg editor but TEXTILE java shorcuts (that means, generating TEXTILE markup NOT HTML like there is for bbCode, which in no way has the same underlying logic as an editor generating more or less poorly marked up HTML…
Last edited by davidm (2005-01-17 00:58:21)
.: Retired :.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
> tmacwrig wrote:
> It’s not really a question of “why can’t users learn textile” – it’s “why do users have to learn Textile?” I don’t see a technical reason why not, and I see many practical reasons for integrating a WYSIWYG.
Pros : I can’t see ones. Beside, try to code a really good wysiwyg editor… you will discover the horrible truth about user ergonomy, multi dimensionnal translations egonomics, and coding hell for cross browser capability (or you could do it in XUL, yes).
Cons : it’s a lot, I mean a lot of work that imo should go elsewhere… like in granularity rights and privileges for example.
But, no one is stopping you from doing it, TXP is GPL after all ;)
One thing that might be related, and imo very much more useful is a import/export tool. I would love to be able to export one or several articles in a clean word-processor format (OpenOffice, or .rtf), or to use a word processor to write article and then export them to TXP.
Lodel does this (it’s the purpose of this CMS), and it’s very much useful. For the hypotethic person who want to use his word processor, it’s even simpler and better (imo) than a web wysiwyg editor.
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#19 2005-01-17 01:04:52
- davidm
- Member
- From: Paris, France
- Registered: 2004-04-27
- Posts: 719
Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
On this last bit, Jeremie, I have something for you … It’s called servOO
“It converts documents prepared in a word-processor into XHTML for publication on the web. ServOO is based on OpenOffice.org so support many usual formats, for instance rtf, doc, sxw.”
———————
And since you’re french, LODEL, a french CMS, is using it. It’s more specialised in scientific and research publishing but it’s also an innovative CMS (despite the use of the same kind of tags as SPIP, which is an older approach…).
Last edited by davidm (2005-01-17 01:07:25)
.: Retired :.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
> davidm wrote:
> But I remind you that my original idea was not to have a HTML wysiwyg editor but TEXTILE java shorcuts (that means, generating TEXTILE markup NOT HTML like there is for bbCode, which in no way has the same underlying logic as an editor generating more or less poorly marked up HTML…
Yep right, sorry about the confusion.
I’m not saying this sort of thing should not appear in TXP, I say in my opinion there are much more useful things to do before that.
But since it’s a job for the admin/backend plugin thing (ahem :p), everyone is free to try to code it and implement it when the ahem-thing appear.
In this direction, for example, and imo, a typographic helper would be more useful. Something that could easily insert caracters that can’t be easily produced with a keyboard, but yet are very common in a well written text.
Last edited by Jeremie (2005-01-17 01:08:41)
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
> davidm wrote:
> On this last bit, Jeremie, I have something for you … It’s called servOO
Yep it’s a Lodel API. An integration with Textile for use with TXP would be nice…
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Jeremie
1) There are WYSIWYG editors that produce decent xhtml. I was just saying that Textile had avoided the flaws of many past editors that didn’t produce it.
2) There are people who can live without good semantic html and may, for whatever reason, have to interact with TXP if their web developer uses it to build a site.
3) I think tmacwrig hits the nail on the head. It’s not why people can’t learn Textile. It is “Why should they have to?” No one has really put forward a critique of why having a wysiwyg plugin would be bad. It just gives you an option. One great thing about TXP is that it is lightweight and coherent in its design but is aimed at letting you expand it if you want.
4) In light of this I don’t see why people shouldn’t strive to create more options for users that want them. I think the live preview would be a good compromise for some (I would enjoy it). The WYSIWYG would be great for others. I think the Word-html—> xhtml(cleaned html)—> Textile plugin I mentioned in a previous post would be very nifty for people who like composing documents in MS Word (or for people who have bunch of word documents they want to post to a TXP site). I’m thinking of implimenting it if I can get together with a programming buddy of mine soon (my coding skills are not up to par).
update: I agree with you Jeremie that there might be more useful things to ad first to TXP. I certainly would like some other things first. Maybe a spell checker that knows how to ignore Textile. I just don’t know if that means this should be ignored. Obviously Dean doesn’t seem too into devoting his time to a WYSIWYG editor, and I don’t blame him, but others could.
Last edited by bleveck (2005-01-17 01:17:19)
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Good point David… I kinda lost sight of the fact that you were proposing shortcuts. That would be a very cool option too.
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Re: A textile "user-friendly" Editor ?
Oh And one more thing. How hard does someone think it would be to use Serv00 and then have another script convert the xhtml to textile? cause that would be bad ass… (if you can’t tell, I have become a bit fixated with this idea in the last 4 hours =) )
Last edited by bleveck (2005-01-17 01:26:03)
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