lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
If we just keep adding and adding more wiki syntax on top of the old, we'll end up with an incomprehensible mess and code that's impossible to debug. We're going to have to simplify the markup before we extend it, and interpreting URLs outside
What if "http:" was a namespace like "user:", you would use [[namespace:<data>]] for all sorts of links and that would be it. No more bare URLs and no [URL] with single brackets. That would be a reduction in complexity, and give you a modular design, with a new module for each namespace that would interpret <data> following. You could have [[tex:<data>]] for TeX math formulas and [[ISBN:<data>]] for ISBN numbers. The only rule for <data> would be it couldn't contain a double closing bracket.
Existing links and patterns that fall outside of this would have to be converted, but data has been converted before.
I haven't tried this, and don't know if it would work out.