WYSIWYG editor

Wiki markup allows editors to use simple formatting markup to layout a page. This is usually pretty OK, and most editors get the hang of it pretty quickly. However, it may be useful to have WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing built into MediaWiki.

Rationale
Wiki markup is a great way to make documents that are easy to edit from any browser. However, modern GUI browsers, including Internet Explorer and Mozilla, have built-in functionality to use WYSIWYG editing features. Although they implement this feature differently (moment of silence for Web standards here), there are some toolkits that allow creating cross-browser WYSIWYG systems.

Letting editors use a WYSIWYG input system has a number of advantages:


 * Those first-time editors who get scared off by complicated Wiki markup -- not to mention hairy HTML markup -- will have a familiar, word-processor-style interface to work with instead.
 * You can see what an article will look like without previewing it. This should save at least some round-trips to the server.

The current editing technique, using HTML TEXTAREAs, could be provided as a fallback for those with older or text-based browsers, or Wiki markup diehards, or people who just want a fine level of control.