On Wednesday 14 February 2007 10:42:47 Chuck Smith wrote:
Another benefit of changing the double single quotes and triple single quotes to // and ** respectively is that it would be a small step to making MediaWiki markup more Creole-compatible (www.wikicreole.org). Also, it seems like a conversion script for just these two elements would not be that difficult to write. What could be potential complications?
I don't want to disrupt you but I definitely like the ' syntax and I am not willing to stop using it.
Why?
'' get used especially for highlighting of single words words or short sentences of other people. So it is used very much for quick and dirty "inline"-quoting. You probably can argue that " '' are hard to distinguish and that a proper quote needs " (well proper quotes use a bunch of other characters not on our standard keyboards ;-) beside italic.
Another point is that * syntax clashes with lists. Lists with * are a really intuitive thing. Do not mix them with something else (for example what about italic in a list, something I really use often). Something like ** [space] * is not going to work. Never.
So although the current mediawiki syntax has its disadvantages, the core syntax (I don't talk about templates) is very much balanced and is causing very few problems withing our limited common standard character set.
And of course Usenet doesn't count. It is about exchanging arguments and not about creating articles.
Arnomane