On Thu, 25 Jul 2002 lcrocker(a)nupedia.com wrote:
This made me
think: Would it make sense to make a formal BNF
grammar for the Wikipedia text format, so a LALR(1) parser could
be made for it? Would that make any sense at all with PHP, or
just be too hard to code and inflexible?
I'd love to have a formal grammar of some kind (I think regexps
would be fine), and I agree with Jan that a totally wiki-specific
syntax would be far better than out current mish-mash of HTML and
wiki markup. But I'm not sure if it's not already too late to
revisit those decisions.
But if it isn't, I'll be happy to discuss what a syntax might
look like.
Wiki is still a new concept. Think how HTML was based on SGML, then
evolved into HTML 2, 3, 4, 5, and then XML came along, because people
understood from the HTML experience that SGML was overly complex.
There is a big world of PhpWikis out there with [single bracket] link
syntax. There are other wiki implementations with different ideas about
syntax. But no wiki is as big as Wikipedia, so this is the most
concentrated amount of experience. This is where a format standard should
or at least could start to form.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/