On 11/06/05, Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com wrote:
I considered <<! This is a comment>> as well, but why add the character just to make it look more like HTML? The "noname" extension seemed like a reasonably understandable thing to do.
I'm a bit sceptical about having a "null" extension, too - the main problem being that it is an example of "significant whitespace", something you rightly (imho) rejected for pre-formatted text. "<< image foo >>" looks too much like "<<image foo>> for my liking, so having one be an image and the other a comment seems unwise. (I'm not necessarily suggesting that "<< image foo >>" should include an image, but having it visibly pass through as invalid would probably be preferable to having it "vanish". Having *something* explicit for saying "this is a comment" would therefore be a good idea.
Whether to use "<<comment foo>>" or "<<!foo>>", or something else, touches on a larger question I already made about whether to go with words or symbols to denote what "class" of inclusion is taking place. As in, would "<<include foo>>" be better off as "<<+foo>>", etc. I think such a carefully designed syntax should consider carefully which approach to take (or exactly how to mix them), and to try and clarify my thoughts, I've made a table with examples and comments, and placed at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:IMSoP/ext-markup [I wanted to use wiki-markup :p]