On 8/4/06, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
Sounds sensible to me. "Magic" syntax where
seemingly normal-looking
text gets transformed is evil, because it's unclear what's going on, and
prone to breakage. MediaWiki took a great leap forward by moving from
magical CamelCase links to [[marked-up links]], for example. Just about
the only necessary evil I can think of is the auto-date-formatting;
dates are too common to really be done any other way, although it too is
slightly evil and sometimes kicks in or doesn't kick in in unexpected ways.
What about
http://magic.formatting.com ? Is that a necessary evil? I
suspect it's probably not that evil.
Which auto date formatting do you mean, btw? I see these constant
references to it when people link stuff like [[August 8]], but we
don't seem to have any settings that return a nice result like "8th of
August", which is what my personal preference would be...
Using link syntax to induce special formatting is definitely not right.
Steve