Support Ticket
Cut and paste to and from plain text editor loses formatting+issues
From one of our PDEC members who is trying to edit a long, formatted description on hub.pde.cc, and expected wikitext syntax:
The killer argument for editing with syntax rather than wysiwyg is
that big contributors like to use their favorite text editor rather
than Wagn's wysiwyg editor (sorry, wagn developers, but world does
not need yet another editor - everybody already has his favorite one).
This way they are productive and they stay with local copy just in
case the wiki screws up and eats your text. Happens pretty often when
two people accidentally simultaneously edit the same page (do not yet
know what Wagn does in this situation, but I have learned to mistrust
wikis in this respect and am noot easily convinced otherwise).
Proposed fixes:
1. Allow use of traditional wiki syntax (e.g. mediawiki), or
2. Document and allow use of Wagn's internal syntax (I am pretty
certain Wagn uses some syntax to serialize rich text to
a database field).
The "fix" of editing in HTML is not particularly attractive as
the syntax is cumbersome and even more geeky than wiki syntax.
Furthermore, I'm pretty sure I can create using HTML constructs
that Wagn wysiwyg editor can not cope with. Possibly even that wagn
rendering can not cope with.
Until bidirectional cut and paste without loss of formatting
is supported, I cannot use Wagn for my projects. I hope
you understand the importance of this feature and how it
affects adoption.
--Sampo Kellomäki
In your particular case, if you currently have a bunch of text in some markup, then the easiest way to transfer it to pretty much any platform that doesn't happen to support that particular markup variant (and there are TONS), is to render it to html and then copy it. If you've currently got it in some markup, then it must have been somewhere that can render it to a normal HMTL webpage. Do that, then cut and paste, and you're done.
fwiw, I definitely don't see how the wiki syntax address addresses the everyone-loves-a-different-editor issue. (a) Everyone loves a different markup, and (b) it's generally much harder to convert from an editor to marked-up text than to HTML, which is what most WYSIWYG editors, including ours, use.
In terms of our storage, no problem: we're using HTML, which, in fact, you can edit directly via the wysiwyg. The only exceptions are links and inclusions, the syntax for which is documented here.
So the lingua franca argument is ANTI-markup, not PRO-markup. The only lingua franca on the web in the markup realm is HTML (M = markup), and only wysiwyg edits directly in that forma. There are several other good reasons for markup (fast for experienced users, explicit, etc), but the lingua franca is against.
As for the one-more-editor, wagn has not reinvented this particular wheel -- we're using tinyMCE, one of the most widely used wysiwyg editors out there.
In general, there is no way that any platform will support bidirectional cut and paste to and from every known format unless it already has built-in knowledge of every known format. I suppose you could shoot for that, but in any event, it makes sense to start with the most common format -- HTML -- and work from there.
If HTML is it, then please document
if there are any limitations I should be aware of. Rather than just inserting
, ,
or
, can I also insert
tags. These can quickly lead to quagmire of unrenderable pages or even scripts
interacting with each other.
----Sampo (Not signed in).....Thu Nov 10 13:51:35 -0800 2011
In above comment HTML markup examples were destroyed by the system. Please try to view the source to see what I meant. --Sampo
----Sampo (Not signed in).....Thu Nov 10 13:53:40 -0800 2011
, can I also insert
, , , , etc. complicated
or
tags. These can quickly lead to quagmire of unrenderable pages or even scripts
interacting with each other.
----Sampo (Not signed in).....Thu Nov 10 13:51:35 -0800 2011
In above comment HTML markup examples were destroyed by the system. Please try to view the source to see what I meant. --Sampo
----Sampo (Not signed in).....Thu Nov 10 13:53:40 -0800 2011
Once the HTML is stripped, it's gone (even from source) and there's no way we can look at it.
I do agree that we should document what HTML is allowed in Basic cards.
--John Abbe.....Thu Nov 10 22:44:02 -0800 2011