I don't want to bother people with long text - so first the link (page uses javascript!):
http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~mlemke/creole_editor_prototype01/creole_editor_prototype01.htm
this is mostly based on other peoples work and as for now it is just for the purpose of studdying the usability of such an editor
the background:
Am currently setting up a DokuWiki with Creole syntax 1.0 (but the advanced Creole 0.6 plugin still needs some fixes!) for my company (internal use).
I really like the fast way to format and structure the text using wiki syntax. And I really would like to "force" less-advanced users to use wiki syntax (for the structuring reason).
On the other hand, wiki text often gets hardly readable (mostly because of links and unaligned tables) - so even as an advanced user, I would like to have more than a preview that needs to be generated server-side (resulting in noticable latencies).
I know about the wysiwyg plugins using fckw or niceedit and I think they might solve this problem in the desired manner (perhaps requiring some adaption). But with respect to the attempt putting up a standard for wiki markup (creole), I wanted to try another shot: a usable client-side creole editor.
Some people might be aware of WikiWizard(
http://www.jspwiki.org/wiki/WikiWizard), which is a java-applet wysiwym-editor for creole. WYSIWYM stands for "what you see is what you mean" and implies, that the markup that is input gets formatted in a way that gives you a good impression about the resulting page structure.
However, I think that the java applet is a bit too heavy and putting it to work within existing wikis might be a bit too complicate. Therefore I tried Ivan Fomichev's Creole parser/XHTML renderer and combined it with a fully movable input window.
Still a lot of work needs to be done before this really becomes usable for a real wiki, but I would like to hear your thoughts about this approach - is it worth to continue development?
Or is WYSIWYM/WYSIWYG much more usable than LIVEPREVIEW? If so - what about adapting the Javascript Creole parser for WYSIWYM editing? And what about making WYSIWYM more like WYSIWYG by hiding the wiki markup that hardly can be influenced given current text cursor position?
another interesting link regarding this kind of editor development might be
http://www.wymeditor.org/
(just found)
BTW: I don't like to discuss the pro's and con's of Creole and DokuWiki markup here - this should be another topic. I just felt that it would be a good idea to decide which markup should be used before starting to develop the content of the wiki. My decision for Creole was based very much on the assumption that because of standardization the interest in comfortable creole editors will grow.