On 27.03.2012 09:33, Oren Bochman wrote:
1. JSON - that's not a very reader friendly
format. Also not an ideal format
for the search engine to consume. This is due to lack of Support for
metadata and data schema. XML is universally supported, more human friendly
and support a schema which can be useful way beyond their this initial .
JSON is the internal serialization format. It will not be shown to the user or
used to communicate with clients. Unless of course they use JSON for interaction
with the web API, as most do.
The full text search engine will be fed a completely artificial view of the
data. I agree that JSON wouldn't be good for that, though XML would be far worse
still.
As to which format and data model to use to represent Wikidata records
internally: that's a different discussion, independent of the idea of
introducing ContentHandlers to MediaWiki. Please post to wikidata-l about that.
2. Be bold but also be smart and give respect where it
is due. Bots and
everyone else who's written tools for and about MediaWiki, who made a basic
assumption about the page structure would be broken. Many will not so readily
adapt.
I agree that backwards compatibility is very important. Which is why I took care
not to break any code or client using the "old" interface on pages that contain
wikitext (i.e. the standard/legacy case). The current interface (both, the web
API as well as methods in MediaWiki core) will function exactly as before for
all pages that contain wikitext.
For pages not containing wikitext, such code can not readily function. There are
two options here (currently controlled by a global setting): pretend the page is
empty (the default) or throw an error (probably better in case of the web API,
but too strict for other uses).
3. A project like wikidata - in its infancy should
make every effort to be
backwards compatible, It would be far wiser to be place wikidata into a page
with wiki source using an custom <xml/> tag or even <cdata/> xhtml tag.
I strongly disagree with that, it introduces more problems than it solves; Denny
and I decided against this option specifically in the light of the experience he
collected with embedding structured data in wikitext in Semantic MediaWiki and
Shortipedia.
But again: that's a different discussion, please post your concerns to wikidata-l.
Regards,
Daniel