Haven't tackled it yet. Explicit communication between the browser and TextMate isn't the crucial part, at least for me, plus I know at the very least it'd be pretty easy to set up an AppleScript (invoked via a Quicksilver trigger or something) to do the legwork. TextMate would still have to do a bunch of work, including logging in, so most of the communication would have to be done with the server directly rather than through the browser.
I've read the external editor spec <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Help:External_editors/Tech> and the sample Perl implementation <http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/extensions/ee/ee.pl? view=markup>; the part I don't get about it is that the external editor still has to do all the work of screen-scraping the damned page. You can fetch the raw wikitext of a page with ?action=raw, eliminating the need for screen-scraping, in theory.
But to me it seems like the point of grabbing the wikitext is to edit it -- and if you want to submit an edit you *have* to grab the ? action=edit version of the page anyway. Why? Because there are POST values you must submit that you can't get without scraping that page -- two timestamps and an edit token. Even their own Perl implementation resorts to regexes to grab these values from the HTML.
Hopefully the preceding paragraphs convey what it took me hours to conclude: MediaWiki's efforts to facilitate external editors are somewhat promising, but ultimately half-baked. There's a great spec for a protocol called WTTP <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ WikiText_Transfer_Protocol> which would solve all these problems quite elegantly, in my opinion, but it doesn't seem to have much momentum, from what I can tell.
At any rate, I think MediaWiki's idea of delivering a custom MIME type (so that the browser can associate the content with a specific application) is excellent. (When you request a page with ? action=raw, in fact, it's served with a Content-Type of text/x-wiki.) And the best part about the external editor spec is that it's a really quick, terse way to grab some configuration values that the user would otherwise have to enter.
But when it comes to MIME types, Safari is hardly an A-student (it ignores the MIME type if it thinks it knows better <http:// diveintomark.org/archives/2004/08/13/safari-content-sniffing>), so frankly I'm glad there's more than one way to do it.
(This is what happens when you spend your weekend reading about wiki software instead of going outside.)
Andrew
On Mar 5, 2006, at 7:54 PM, Michael Sheets wrote:
Well I'm actually interested for another reason, I was trying to figure out how to have a text box sent to TextMate from a browser and Allan pointed out the MediaWiki external editor spec page. Would be interested to see how you tackled the issue.
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