On Tue, Jul 30, 2002 at 12:23:39PM +0100, Steve Callaway wrote:
It occurs to me that there is going to be an awful lot of reworking if we ever do go to an XML format Wikipedia (and this definitely needs discussion at some point soon).
Well, I would prefer an XML-free format but either is going to be nog very difficult if we have a formal description of the grammar of the mark-up in a form that is understood by Yacc. (I'm working on that at the moment, we need such a grammar anyway.) Then we can do an automatic conversion of old mark-up to new mark-up and probably even detect the few cases where formatting is likely to be broken.
You can do a lot more with HTML format than you ever can with Wiki formatting.
That's actually a good reason *not* to use HTML. When you start doing "a lot more" it will also be "a lot more" difficult to understand and rewrite what you wrote. WIkipedia is not just about you writing but about you writing and others rewriting it. :-)
-- Jan Hidders