Thread Subject: Re: FW: FW: tables in wiki?

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From: Jared Smith
Date: Mon, Oct 30 2006 3:00 PM

On 10/30/06, Jim Tobias < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>
> This is getting beside the point, which was, "Are there any methods of
> creating and editing tables in a wiki that are friendly enough for
> non-techie users and accessible enough as well?" Tools that convert
> tables
> into wikicode will not be good enough. I suspect that the answer to this
> question is an overall "no". Which means that we may need to create, edit,
> and share some other way.


I don't know of any tool that allows the native generation of wiki tables
without the user knowing the syntax. But I think the conversion tools are
very much relevant. If I wanted to add a table to the wiki, I'd use Word or
Dreamweaver or some other tool to generate basic HTML code, then I'd use a
conversion tools to convert that HTML to wikitext. This would provide an
entirely accessible and relatively easy-to-use method.

I don't believe the wiki is the cause of this frustration either. I think we
would be having this conversation regardless of the web tool we are using -
there just are no WYSIWYG type tools for HTML table creation and editing
that are also fully accessible. So we can either use a tool that is
easy-to-use, but inaccessible and non-collaborative (e.g., Google Docs). Or
we can use the wiki and wikitext (and maybe some external conversion tools)
which are accessible, but a bit difficult to use. I don't know what "other
way" there might be.

Jared

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