On Feb 4, 2008 4:07 PM, Moshe Weitzman wrote:

Input formats are important, but not really for the reasons that Gabor
mentioned. Consider the comment field on groups.drupal.org. I recently
added live preview[..] It is WYSIWYG, but he intelligence is on the
server, not the client. I don't think a client will ever have have
markdown.php nor will it understand all our filters for inserting
images, inserting Views, etc. IMO, the best bet is a tag
insertion/filter insertion module on the client and leave the WYSIYG
to live.module.

Well whatever happens for D7, this is what I'll be implementing on the sites I run in the near future (having seen it on g.d.o for the first time a week or two ago and going wow!). However, the main motivation for 'wysiwyg in core' seems to be to hide markup entirely from site visitors - which has to be impossible to do in a way which can take account of the actual information that can be put into a textarea. If I've misunderstood this demand, and simple tag insertion + live previews would satisfy the clamouring, then that'd be great, but I have a bad feeling it won't.

At the moment there's two issues:

* RTEs are *bad* (really bad) because they can never hide markup and do actual wysiwyg at the same time. This is partly why they've traditionally produced such shocking markup.
* a tag inserter + live previews are probably not what's wanted by those who really, really want a wysiwyg editor, because they don't hide markup - although you do get real, genuine, wysiwyg this way, and bad markup isn't enforced.

What both have in common is the tag insertion - which I think is something that could be separated from both and unified in terms of how core and contrib handles it. Then client side processing and/or live previews (or neither) handles that side of things independently of generating the markup, and potentially everyone's happy ;)