Last modified: 2011-04-14 15:10:28 UTC
wikibits.js / insertTags was originally designed for wrapping selected text with start and end tags. Later it was used as a cheap way to enter arbitrary characters not on the keyboard since it already handled various browsers etc. Later again the charinsert extension gave us a new tag to make it easier to create sections of useful but hard to type characters. Now insertTags is probably used a lot more for charinsert than for inserting tags. We probably need a new function "insertChar" or "insertSpecial" that doesn't care about tags but can replace the selection with the clicked special character.
See also bug 9593
Do you mean for single-item inserts, rather than for paired inserts?
Yes I do mean for single-item inserts, these seem to be far more common these days. Think of the accented characters and foreign alphabets used in large numbers on quite a few wikis now. Look how many are used on the English Wiktionary for example.
