On Apr 7, 2004, at 7:57 PM, Timwi wrote:
David Friedland wrote:
Timwi wrote:
There is no other way I can imagine that people seriously prefer <math>x^2</math> over simple-and-quick [!x^2!] or [$x^2$] or whatever. Except for <rend type="math">, *all* proposed syntaxes are better than <math>.
The reason that non-savvy users might prefer <math>x^2</math> is that it requires understanding the concept of markup, a concept which most people learn in the context of HTML, and the very first thing you learn when you attempt to learn HTML is that things are enclosed in things that look like <something> </something>.
Which is also why we use <b>...</b> instead of ''', <a> instead of [[...]], <li> instead of *, etc.?
Think about it: '' and ''' make a lot of sense visually. Same goes for [[...]], at least more sense than <a href=...>. Why <a>!? (*I* know why, but many people don't.) And it's *really* obvious that * and # are easy to interpret.
These symbols make the syntax *more* human-readable. For extensions it starts to get muckier and, after all, less common.
Myself, I'd like to have the XML-like tags for inline content and something more {{msg:xyz}}-like for transclusion. That, to me, is the most readable solution.
Peter
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