On 4/6/07, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey(a)wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
A lot of this needs to be detected by MediaWiki up
front when the pages
are saved rather than waiting for tidy to clean it up later.
I deal with this breakage every time I import and test a dump file.
MediaWiki could avoid a lot of these issues by detecting garbage
when the pages are saved.
This is a philosophical issue about how Wiki works. The lack of hard
syntax rules that people must conform to facilitates discover and
greatly softens the learning curve. ... it also means that our content
will perpetually be rubbish syntactically.
I used to find this very distasteful. But a lot more time thinking
about it, I don't feel as bad about it. What is bad is that our
syntax is not well defined (and is, in fact, partially defined by tidy
of all things) ... this means that making changes while remaining bug
to bug compatible is nearly impossible.
I don't think syntax checking is a desired feature, ... but having a
grammar which is well defined enough that changes can be made without
breaking dependencies on unexpected aspects of our behavior would be
very desirable. ... but doing so without breaking compatibility with
the existing syntax is probably impossible.