Thansk, Tomaž and David.
My concern is that the mediawiki dev team should have some plan whatever the
parser will parse one time or many times.
Someone should push things to progress gradually.
Wikimedia projects have been accumulated so huge a repository of knowledge.
And these knowledge should be used in a wider circumstances. Could you
imagine that wikipedia articles was always bounded with a php regexp parser?
Then any formal description of the wikitext is welcomed. We should free the
knowledge from its format.
Thanks again.
Regards,
Mingli
On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 9:01 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2008/7/14 Tomaž Šolc <tomaz.solc(a)zemanta.com>om>:
- From my observations I believe that the only
possible way that any
formal grammar will replace the current PHP parser is if the MediaWiki
team is prepared to change the current philosophy of desperately trying
to make sense of any kind of broken string of characters the user
provides i.e. if MediaWiki could throw up a syntax error on invalid
input and/or they significantly reduce the number of valid constructs
(all horrible combinations of bold/italics markup come to mind)
Given my understanding of the project I find this extremely unlikely.
But then I'm not a MediaWiki developer, so I might be completely wrong
here.
I suspect it's highly unlikely that we'll ever have a situation where
any wikitext will come up with "SYNTAX ERROR" or equivalent. (Some
templates on en:wp do something like this for bad parameters, but they
try to make the problem reasonably obvious to fix.) Basically, the
stuff's gotta work for someone who can't work a computer or think in
terms of this actually being a computer language rather than text with
markup. I would *guess* that an acceptable failure mode would be just
to render the text unprocessed.
The thing to do with particularly problematic "bad" constructs would
be to go through the wikitext corpus and see how often they're
actually used and how fixable they are.
Remember also third-party users of MediaWiki, who may expect a given
bug effect to work as a feature.
- d.
- d.
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