On Sat, 10 Aug 2002, Jan Hidders wrote:
From a technical point of view XML is clearly superior. So why don't
we use it? Because we want a mark-up that is easy to read, easy to understand, easy to type and non-intimidating for people who know next to nothing about HTML.
I think a good way of viewing the problem is to try not to think of all our wiki kodes as "markup", but rather as features of our simple editor. When someone makes a GUI frontend to Wikipedia, those features will become more sophisticated (wysiwyg).
What we store in the database is an entirely different question, but right now, since we only have one frontend, storing the plain editor text there is easier. One day, it will probably be XML.
-- Daniel