Editor: Advice needed about its near future

Hi Revathi Priya ,

I posted yesterday in the Wiki Bugs forum, regarding problems with the WYSIWYG editor, discovered since the improvements to the Styles combo box.

Today I'd like some advice how to proceed. We're hoping to open our wiki to a wider group of editing users, and need to know how to guide them.

The questions:

1. Is the WYSIWYG editor intended to leave some of the text "bare", that is, unenclosed by any tags (such as p, or li), or should it prohibit that? If it is supposed to ensure that all text is enclosed in suitable tags, then will there be a fix soon so it succeeds?

2. If the editor is intended to allow bare text, then this messes up the styles combo box -- the style shown doesn't track when the cursor is in bare text, and instead the last legitimate style is shown. Could that be addressed with an additional "style" called "bare" or something?

Currently, when typing within a p region, hitting Enter causes the editor to close that p and start a new one. But when typing in a bare region, hitting Enter causes the editor to insert a br tag.

This is causing a bit of a headache, because Normal and bare text in most regards look alike (depending on the CSS we supply), but do not behave the same regarding spacing at end of paragraphs (ie, between p blocks) versus at a br tag (which the editor inserts when hitting the Enter key in bare text).

And it's very non-trivial to try to use CSS to make bare br's look like paragraph spacing in a cross-browser-safe way. (Been there before with a competitor's wiki that only uses br tags, and no p tags!)

At any rate, we would be better able to assess what to do if we knew whether or not the editor should be prohibiting bare text. If it should, then we can try to conform with that, even if an editor fix is not immediately available.

Thanks!

- Graham

Other notes:

-- We don't want to get rid of all br tags. Within a p tag, hitting shift-Enter inserts a br tag, and this is normally used to start a new line without a paragraph gap. Very useful. Just not helpful in bare text.

-- There's an additional related problem that if you apply Normal style to lists (that is, il items), this will add p tags inside the li's, which is generally not wanted.