[Wikitext-l] Is wikitext an HTML shorthand language, or a real markup language?

[Thomas Dalton]

On 11/12/2007, Jim Wilson <wilson.jim.r at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is the new grammar going to allow hard coded HTML such as <div
> class="someClass">whatever</div>?

The current parser allows straight HTML, there's just a whitelist of
allowed tags (for example, <b>).

> If so, then wikitext is bound to remain semantically just HTML
> shorthand, right?  Since the only valid output mechanism is HTML.

There's no reason wikitext can't be parsed into something else, PDF
for example. The main reason it can't be done now is because we don't
know what the wikitext means other than what HTML it turns into. Once
we have a proper grammar, we can (at least in theory) parse it into
anything we like.