On 7/5/07, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 09:03:06PM +0100, David Gerard wrote:
MediaWiki's is, I understand, provably impossible to put in EBNF, which is why the parser documentation is the parser code ... But it's not actually worse than any of the others. Though possibly it has more odd bits bolted on the side.
Well, yeah... but if you order the semantic bits in MWtext, and arrange them in, say, order of popularity...
I wonder how far up the tree you can climb before everything falls apart? :-)
The real substance of my question, though, was "what was the underlying justification behind creating a "new all-singing, all-dancing wikitext syntax a) at this late date, b) which is not a proper subset, at least, of the wikitext syntax in broadest use?" -- either by number of pages, or, I would venture to speculate, number of installations.
Cheers,
-- jra
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
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One day i had this crazy idea of creating my own wiki engine from scratch (although it never materialised to anything) - when planning syntax I came to the conclusion that the best number of characters to use for each style of formatting was 3. It is both relatively unused (compared to single and double character sequences), easy to remember (3 is the magic number), and it is easy to see if you have malformed your syntax. Thanks, MinuteElectron.