Thread:Extension talk:WYSIWYG/The VisualEditor extension looks promising/reply (2)

''I wrote a variation of the text below in the Semantic Mediawiki user list a few months ago, this seems like a good place to repeat it. I just played with the latest VisualEditor and it still seems mostly applicable...''

I’ve played with the VisualEditor, and have a link to it on my personal home page to keep up with it. The UX is clean, and there are pluses to it being mediawiki aware which make it easier for it to add mediawiki components to the document (like Categories). For me, considering the roadmap and imagining how features manifest based on how it looks now, it still seems too minimalist in the control area, compared to the WYSIWYG extension that minimizes control real estate to make many more common controls visually obvious an one click away (illustrated for people who haven’t seen either):

That was a lot to type with WYSIWYG, and it would have been better served as a feature-present checklist, but at least for now I was in a hurry. The interface works fine, with visual icons and hover making control selection simple. I asked our guys about Word import, and everyone I asked liked the ability to cut-and-paste from Word to their mediawiki pages, particularly tables. So for that import (which I don’t see on the VE roadmap), for the richness of the control set available, for ease of use, and certainly for the beta condition, I don’t see VE being viable for us any time soon. I’m still stuck with WYSIWYG / MW17 because I need it within a Semantic Form. WYSIWYG is supported in MW21 and I’ve run it from there, but it doesn’t work in the free text area of Semantic Forms, and like most of us, I’m too busy to get it to work right now.