On 12/09/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 05:44:29PM +0100, David Gerard
wrote:
> On 12/09/06, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote:
> > Thus, even in wiki syntax, a specification
must define what constitutes
> > "valid" markup, and then define the behaviour for that valid mark-up.
> I think you are completely and utterly wrong on
this. Every
> combination of wikitext has to be able to do something, because it is
> a *language*.
Well, *my* opinion is that you're in violent
agreement, gents. :-)
I hope so :-)
> If people who can't work computers put a
character out of place and
> the wiki engine just spits back "INVALID CONTENT", are they going to
> edit an article ever again? *Hell* no.
Of course not.
But Timwi's assertion is, indirectly, at least, that it's necessary
to define *how to behave when you *get* something ill-formed*, which as
a subset, requires that you define well-formed clearly.
mmmmmmmmm true. Mind you, you end up with a pile of special cases, but
that may not actually be a bad thing.
Consider things like the ''' hack in Mediawiki - if you have
[letters]'''[letters]'' it doesn't go bold then italic - it goes
apostrophe, italic. This is for French and Italian, when you have "the
aaaa" as l'aaaa and you want the "aaaa" italicised but not the
article. Is that an annoying special case? Yep. Is it an excellent and
useful idea if humans are going to use this thing? Arguably. Then you
have to special-case some more with how to be sure it's not bolding as
well. Etc.
Special case upon special case. This makes deep-thinking geeks go
"eww", because they're used to seeing a mass of special cases and
attempting to abstract out the simpler rule of what's actually
happening. But there *isn't* one, because humans are annoying and
their languages have structure but also way too many bolted-on
irregular bits.
So, uh, cross-wiki syntax will be fun all the way down ;-)
(I'm currently heavily using Mediawiki on WMF projects and MoinMoin at
work, and lightly using UseMod at work. Switching modes is not as
confusing as it might be, because Mediawiki and MoinMoin syntax is
different enough not to mix them up. Much.)
- d.