* Sergey Chernyshev <sergey.chernyshev(a)gmail.com> [Sat, 26 Sep 2009
21:23:25 -0400]:
Guys,
Why are we talking XML? Yaron's Semantic Forms survived without XML -
yes,
it's definition language is not English, but it's good enough and
works
relatively good with the rest of MW syntax.
I think using XML will not necessarily do good here as form creators
would
want the language to be close to the rest of the wiki.
Here's the example of the form which is the mix of wikitext, HTML and
regular wiki formatting
http://www.techpresentations.org/w/index.php?title=Form:Presentation&ac…
It worked for me. Maybe this kind of definition can be merged with
Template
pages, but frankly SF's model works pretty well (of course, SF is also
smart
about data because of SMW, but it can be more "manual").
Hi Sergey,
To me it seems that MediaWiki is moving from pure wiki towards CMS,
thus, broaden it's usage (in contrary to what's been stated in bold at
meta and other sites that MediaWiki is not CMS). Semantic* extensions
and Wikia to me looks like a step towards CMS. Many well-made CMS use
XML because there are good XML libraries which allows various processing
and transformations.
Also, I believe that XML was proposed to define names, type and
description of template parameters and that's also a good idea. Maybe
even implementing the whole templating in XML?
But, when it comes to NS_MAIN, I like wikitext, because I am a coder and
I like to edit a source. I don't like visual tools, like Dreamweaver, MS
Word and so on. Probably the power users, who contribute the most at
wikipedia also like wikitext? I don't know whether there was any survey.
To these who types fast and knows wikitext, it allows to produce
formatted articles quicker than by using the GUI.
But, Wikipedia probably requires an enlargement of it's user base, so
wysiwyg is also very important. To me it seems that it would be great if
Wikipedia was both friendly to these who likes source wikitext and to
these who would love the GUI. But, I don't know whether anyone really
likes wikitext, besides me. If nobody likes it, then it will be dropped.
Dmitriy