Virgil Ierubino wrote:
[fixed URL]
I'm working on writing out an EBNF description of
Wikitext at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitext_Metasyntax , which I hear is much
needed, but have encountered a snag. I don't think EBNF has the power to
describe Wikitext. If anyone here can work out how EBNF can describe
Wikitext's system for bullet points, I'd like to see it. The problem is that
bullet points can build on each other, except each new level has to retain
the markup from the old level, plus a new symbol. e.g. **#* then **#* * then
**#** * then **#*** # etc.
If you can find an EBNF description of HTML, it would be a good place to
start; in my experience, MediaWiki's Wikitext syntax is (mostly)
directly translatable to HTML (eg. links turn into anchors, bullets turn
into list items).
On the topic of "things that need to be
done" if writing an EBNF of Wikitext
isn't going to be beneficial for MediaWiki's longstanding success, I'll not
bother, but is there anything that needs to be done like this to create a
standard?
It /might/ be useful if you wanted to import/export between different
wiki engines that use different syntax - IIRC the MediaWiki syntax is
(fairly) similar to that of UseModWiki (Phase 1), but vastly different
to that of eg. DocuWiki. However, I wouldn't rate it very high on the
priority list.
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