We've been talking for a bit about ways to make the Wikiotics/ductus
textwiki easier to edit. Our ultimate goal is to move to a visual
editing system (not requiring the knowledge of a special syntax), but
without requiring large amounts of development work on our part.
In particular, one thing we've discussed is trying to piggyback on
mediawiki's "visual editor" which is in development. Wikimedia
maintains a mailing list ("wikitext-l") for discussing issues with
parsing and visual editing, with archives at
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/
I would characterize the following thread as a lukewarm reaction to the
idea of making the visual editor work for things other than mediawiki.
(This is slightly different than what Ian heard on the ground at
wikimania, but I am inclined to trust it.)
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/2012-May/000712.html
Also of interest from this thread:
> VisualEditor is the front-end, it does not parse Wikitext, it reads in and
> emits out annotated HTML
The annotated HTML is (from what I understand) translated to/from
wikitext by Parsoid, the parser that the mediawiki team has been working on.
In particular, we need to find out what "annotated HTML" means
specifically in the above sentence. Is it well-defined yet, or is it
something that's in a state of flux? Is it something we can hook onto
(and use as a storage format for our own wikitext), or is it going to be
something tightly coupled to the intricacies and needs and mediawiki itself?
I am reading through the following thread from six months ago, which I
believe is the most informative public discussion of these issues so
far. As of then, the proposal was to use some sort of HTML5 microdata
to store annotations, but it does not seem that anything was finalized
during that discussion.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/2012-February/000517.html