I concede that there isn’t usually a highlighting editor for wiki markup. I was referring to the LaTEX remarks.

Instead of agreeing or disagreeing with any particular examples of highlighting failure you claim, I’ll ask a counterquestion. Have you tried entering any complex structure in a “WYSIWYG” editor, like MSWord or OOo Writer? I’ve needed to enter multilevel lists with multiparagraph items using different bulletting/numbering styles at different levels at various times. Every time I tried to make the magic Space, Enter and Backspace meanings (with Shift and Ctrl adding yet more magic, oh joy) produce a structure the way I meant to, I ended up pouncing on the keyboard randomly. That is, before pulling my hair out.

Maybe other people can really make WYSIWYG work for them, I don’t know. Personally I find markup drastically easier and more predictable (even when I make the inevitable mistakes).

Aristotle,

Lack of instant feedback is only an issue if you’re using a very dumb editor.

Yes, the sort of very dumb editors that are traditionally provided by web-sites rather than applications (and I, again, cite the text box I am using to type in this comment.)

Syntax highlighting is the minimum I demand, and catches 95% of my stupid mistakes.

I am afraid you lost me there; I would love it if you could explain further.

Syntax highlighting is very powerful when you are using a sophisticated language, like a programming language. It can help ensure that your brackets are matched, and highlight when you type <emphass> rather than <emphasis>.

However, it can’t help you with the more basic stuff (like trying to remember that I can’t type <emphasis> straight in, but have to type &lt;emphasis>. In fact, the first draft of this comment was mistaken full of “&gt;” instead of “&lt;” – a mistake I would never make in a WYSIWYG editor.

It also doesn’t reveal to you that you have included an extra space in your link title, or even forgottenthat you need a trailing space after an <a> tag but not after a <p> tag.

Alastair,

I looked briefly at the blurb for Ecto, and it seemed pretty exciting. I will have to give it a try. Thanks!

I have been mulling over the concept that “people soon learn” for a few months. Not so much in relation to this, but also when considering how we should treat people who used to be antisocial, but have now seen the light. For example, people who used to be violent criminals, be aggressive drivers, or even click on reply-to-all to say “please unsubscribe me from this list”, but who now act honourable.

It may well be true marking up semantics rather than fonts is something that people eventually learn, but we will always be dealing with yet more people who haven’t learned yet.

Lack of instant feedback is only an issue if you’re using a very dumb editor. Syntax highlighting is the minimum I demand, and catches 95% of my stupid mistakes. The rest, if one is inclined to track those down, would be an issue of having a validating editor, like Emacs’ AUCTeX or nxml modes.

Oops that should say “tag it as <emphasis>” in that last paragraph. If only I had used a WYSIWYG editor…

All good points, and I had planned a followup where I showed how MarsEdit is a happy medium between the two: addressing of the limitations of browser-based editing but not imposing WYSIWYG editing on us all. Of your list of features for a WYSIWYG editor, MarsEdit provides all of those with the possible exception of instant feedback. Can’t run MarsEdit? Look at ecto.

Agree partially that most users “think formatted first” (if I can put it like that). However it’s a habit that soon fades. Particularly if you’re in mid-flow of a sentence and can’t remember what the house style is for emphasis, it’s actually conducive to writing to simply tag it as and move on. Once you’ve used a rich markup language like DocBook for any length of time, it becomes second nature to just use semantic tags everywhere instead of trying to remember what the current house style for formatting is… (or perhaps to put it more realistically, you spend your time wondering what the best semantic markup is rather than on what the most appropriate formatting is)