visual editor: creole -> html5 conversion

[Laurent Savaëte]

Judging from the conversation we had today, the visual editor prototype
based on aloha seems to please everyone (please let me know if I
misunderstood things!)

This means moving text based content from creole markup to "annotated"
html5. Which brings up the question of what to do with creole based
content. Considering that we are moving to html5 partly because creole
is too limited in what it can do, I don't see a reason to maintain
editable creole.
I see 2 options:

1 - keep support for (existing) creole content and make it so that
editing creole content turns it into html5, so that content saved after
the upgrade to visual editing is only saved in creole format (while
existing content stays as it is). I don't expect any issues with writing
the code for this.
Pros:
- No need to worry about converting existing content on the main site
Cons:
- we need to maintain dependency on creoleparser

2 - drop support for creole altogether. This implies converting all
existing content to html5 and rewriting the resource db. While the
conversion itself is no problem, I am not sure about going back and
fixing the resourceDB. Jim, your input is welcome here.
Cons:
- we need to script the resourceDB conversion (if it's possible to do so)
- running the script implies shutting down the site while the db is
being upgraded
Pros:
- we can drop creoleparser dependency
- we get rid of potential "corner cases" in the code in the future where
we may need to consider the few creole-based pages left from the beginnings

All in all, I feel like option 2 is cleaner in the long run, but
requires more work short-term...(and I'm not even sure it's actually doable)

[Jim Garrison]

I had assumed we would do option 1, at least for now. We can make a
test case so as to make sure we do not break creole rendering or editing
from a document that begins in creole.

If we want to do option 2, we should migrate the format of several
things in the resourcedb all at once: convert the old picture-choice
lessons to flashcards, convert creole to html5+annotation, and also
(most importantly) convert the flashcard decks which save a separate URN
for each cell to the forthcoming new format that saves one URN and
improves seek time (and inode usage). We aren't ready to do this yet,
so I'd say hold off on it for now.

Also, it should be quite possible to do this conversion without shutting
down the site at all, if we make intelligent use of the "union" storage
backend.

[Laurent Savaëte]

ok, let's just sit on it for now...

On Fri 17 Aug 2012 06:38:58 AM CEST, Jim Garrison wrote:
> I had assumed we would do option 1, at least for now. We can make a
> test case so as to make sure we do not break creole rendering or editing
> from a document that begins in creole.

I'll add the test cases, good point.