Thread:CzechOut/@comment-4674838-20120825232426/@comment-4674838-20120826190419

I'm sorry I mentioned the ToU thing, that was far from the best way to talk about this. In my mind, your "no" was (is) final, and represents no desire for further discussion or chance to change your mind. At that point, I felt it would just be best to end the discussion and file my complaint. Color me a bit surprised to see that you wrote so many more messages after that.

To put it another way: Because the RTE is designed to shut down when you throw complex code at it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea to go around triggering that event. To make an analogy: rivers are designed to send stuff to the ocean when you dump stuff into them. That doesn't mean it's a good idea for me dump things into the river. We're not just talking about code, we're talking about how people use it. If it's OK to disable the RTE with a signature (or more severely, whenever and however you feel like it), then does that give everyone else leeway to do the same -- does that give me the right to do it too?

This is one reason why I mentioned the ToU thing. Because someone doing this, in my mind, sets a precedent for something that I do not think is a good idea. I'm not saying "everyone's signature needs to be policed" or "a bunch of pages need to be changed", or talking about local policies (this is a staff run wiki). What I'm asking is, going forward, do I (does anyone?) have any business complaining about someone elses signature disabling the RTE? -- because this is something I don't like.

I'm definitely not against using __NOWYSIWYG__ -- this is a good thing, because it gives people an option to remove it if they disagree with its usage on a particular page, something that cannot as easily be done with complex code.

It's a good thing to minimize the spread of complex code and try to restrict it to templates -- I certainly wouldn't want a bunch of content pages on wikis I contribute to to have a bunch of complex code on them. That makes it harder for everybody to read and maintain! If something can be made to look simple and it can be made to look hard, why not make it look simple?

In technical posts, sometimes it is helpful to have working prototypes, but it is also fine to put wikitext in   tags where it can be read while viewing the page, not just editing (and this does not disable the visual editor). In fact, this is preferable to me, because it encourages people to go try things for themselves (since you haven't given them everything in working condition), which aids in the learning process.

Generally speaking, if you can reduce the amount of complex code on technical posts, doesn't that make it easier for people to understand what's going on? We could go around using as a way to put HTML everywhere. But if wikitext can do the same thing, and is simpler, isn't that better? It's a far better coding practice in my opinion to use __NOWYSIWYG__, than to fill a page with a bunch of complex code specifically for the purpose of disabling the RTE.