David, of course you're right that for a RedCloth-written document to be
displayed in RDoc, it must necessarily lose features (or add features to
RDoc, which would then cease to be RDoc). But if the document is stored in a
dialect (Its Me's D) with a featureset that is a superset of the union of
the features of RedCloth and RDoc, an editing control could conceivably
(just) degrade untranslatable features into plain text, but retain the
markup behind the scenes.
I think WYSIWYG is better and more important, though.
As Thomas Fini Hansen notes, existing editing controls generate HTML.
(Back-translation to Textile/Markdown/RDoc would be possible if the HTML
generated therefrom was identified somehow.)
But what about having a wiki document written in pure HTML? The only
important feature that's obvious to me that a wiki document needs that HTML
doesn't already provide is WikiWords; I'd propose you do something like <a
class="wikiword">Wiki word</a>. This would allow existing HTML editing
controls (e.g. FCKEdit, htmlArea) to be easily leveraged for wiki use.
OK, I don't like that I'm proposing a whole new wiki document format, but
HTML is already more standardised and more commonly used than any of the
others.
The idea of WYSIWYG editing could be applied to, say, RedCloth/Textile quite
easily, too, Easily conceptually; it's obviously going to be a bigger change
to an HTML editing control.
I like Its Me's suggestion of structure-based editing as well, but I don't
know of any existing tools to do that with HTML (although I do remember
seeing a Microsoft XML editor demo in HTML, which could be close, but
probably entirely unportable).
