On Nov 14, 2007 9:03 AM, Steve Sanbeg ssanbeg@ask.com wrote:
On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:27:41 -0500, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 02:02:12PM -0500, Brion Vibber wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
It has been proposed, informally, that wikitext be modified to
prefer,
and then eventually require, new markers for bold and italic text inline.
I would recommend against considering this at this time (if ever).
Hopping around changing basic syntax is probably not the thing to do when in the middle of changing the parser mechanics.
Since, as nearly as I can determine, *reliably* parsing the apostrophe related markup is unspecifiable in a formal fashion, this pretty much kills the idea completely, as far as I can see.
Parsing of the pathological cases doesn't seem specifiable, but a simplified version probably would be.
The current syntax is a balance of "user friendly" and "easy to render".
We can introduce unambiguous syntax, but it's probably hard for people to use.
This has been a repeating problem with all embedded text based markups - there aren't enough keys on a keyboard. You can put in a rapidly parsable unambiguous syntax like SGML or HTML or so forth, or any of the other markup languages, but they're all a lot harder to teach people to use.
What if we only allowed ''italic'', '''bold''' and ''''bold italic'''',
and required a separator between consecutive markup. I.e. ''a''<s/>'''b''' => <i>a</i><b>b</b>; ''a'''''b''' => <i>a'''</a>b<b>..?
What if we didn't allow nesting, so ''italic and '''bold''''' had to be written as ''italic and ''<s/>''''bold''''?
That would probably go along way toward making it specifiable, without affecting 99% of the current text.
Useful thoughts.