Alex Brollo alex.brollo@gmail.com writes:
Just a brief comment: there's no need of seaching for "a perfect wiki syntax", since it exists: it's the present model of well formed markup, t.i. xml.
And, from your answer, we can see that you mean “perfectly understandable to parsers”, but sacrifices human usability. XML is notoriously difficult to produce by hand.
Suppose there was some mythical “perfect” markup.
We wouldn't want to sacrifice the usability of simple Wiki markup — it would need to be something that could be picked up quickly (wiki-ly) by people. After all, if your perfect markup start barfing up XML parser errors whenever someone created not-so-well-formed XML, well, that wouldn't feel very “wiki”, would it?
From what I've seen of this iteration of this conversation, it looks
like people are most concerned with markup that is easy and unambiguous to parse.
While I understand the importance of unambiguous markup or syntax for machines, I think human-centered attributes such as “learn-ability” are paramount.
Perhaps this is where we can cooperate more with other Wiki writers to develop a common Wiki markup. From my brief perusal of efforts, it looks like there is a community of developers involved in http://www.wikicreole.org/ but MediaWiki involvement is lacking (http://bit.ly/hYoki3 — for a email from 2007(!!) quoting Tim Starling).
(Note that I think any conversation about parser changes should consider the GoodPractices page from http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/GoodPractices.)
If nothing else, perhaps there would be some use for the EBNF grammar that was developed for WikiCreole. http://dirkriehle.com/2008/01/09/an-ebnf-grammar-for-wiki-creole-10/