2009/9/25 Platonides<Platonides(a)gmail.com>om>:
Those descriptions will have to be edited by the
same user base that
edit all other pages. Even if they are power users, it's not easy to
write correct XML on the wiki textarea. We would need to create an
editor for the language being created so a template editor can be made.
Since the XML file describes the template, it need only be changed
when the template is changed. Realistically, newbie editors don't edit
templates; anyone skilled enough to edit templates can handle some
simple XML.
I advocate for a simpler syntax for form
definition (but we shouldn't on
the way reinvent wikitext).
Exactly. XML is a decent choice here because it has a well-defined,
pre-existing grammar with parsers already available, which means it's
easy to parse and easy to learn (assuming you've got some shred of a
technical background; see my earlier point about newbies not editing
templates).
My preference is that we shouldn't actually expose the template
definition markup at all during the normal course of events, even when
changing a template.
The field metadata can be fairly straightforwardly displayed and edited
through a nice web interface. XML as such is simply a conveniently
well-defined structured data tree format which can be used both for
storing the field metadata in the DB and exposing it to the template
invocation editor interface (whether client-side JS or server-side PHP
or a custom bot-based tool speaking to our API).
Of course if template creators *want* to dive into the raw field
metadata definition as humans, we do love to expose such things to power
power users for them to play with. :)
-- brion