Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com writes:
WP's markup - or rather MediaWiki's - is a variant of the original WikiWikiWeb's, and was designed with ease of editting (by humans) at the very top of the agenda.
As Perl ;)
As for "hackish", though, I'm not sure I agree: the *syntax* is perfectly good at doing what it does - which is to say, it allows people to describe the formatting they require of a piece of text.
Yes, and that's wrong. I don't care about the formatting, I'd like to markup contents properly. WP unfortunately wants us writers to care about formatting for certain devices (screen and print, not for audio).
With a proper markup language it would not be necessary to change ''' -> '' -> " -> ''' -> « -> '' -> „ -> " all the time; you would simply write <obj>Nuremberg Castle</obj> and you are done. Once and for all. That's only one example.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what that example refers to.
Within a paragraph you often want to highlight some words or phrases. Some of these phrases are citations others are catch words. Some of us uses "quotations marks", others '''bolding''' and next one goes for „German UTF-8 quotations marks“. To avoid those problems, make use of descriptive markup (e.g. TEI XML):
<q>To be, or not to be</q>
Or for catch word, when you want to describe or list famous monument in Nuremberg:
The <obj>Nuremberg Castle</obj> is worth a visit. Some parts of it are from the medieval period. Some buildings are later additions. ... Main Churches are <obj>St. Sebald</obj>, <obj>St. Lorenz</obj> and the <obj>Lady's Chapel</obj>.
I think the key problem with semantic markup is that in order to have any advantage, it has to be both very rich and very standardised - e.g. you'd need to have a way of saying "this text is the name of a film", and people would need to know that this was "<movie>" and not "<film>" (or "<movietitle>" or "<filmtitle>", or any number of other possibilities). If you were to impose such a scheme on something like Wikipedia, you'd just create a tremendous learning curve.
Not necessarily. Most things are obvious. And those, who do not want to make use of it, can write as before...
In 'de' they just invented an invisible "personendaten" box...
Again, you've lost me; for what purpose did they create this "box", in what sense is it "invisible", and how would XML/"a proper markup language" deal with the same issue?
The so called WP markup is not enough. Many a lot symbols are already in use ' | {} [] * # = - : ; and the leading space and empty lines. Sure, all of them are easy to remember and combining and nesting them is no problem. Oops, I forgot to mention that <div>, <span> and some more are also allowed...
Here is an example for the "personendaten" box:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Felixm%C3%BCller
{{Personendaten| NAME=Felixmüller, Conrad |ALTERNATIVNAMEN= |KURZBESCHREIBUNG=bedeutender [[Maler]] des [[Expressionismus]] und der [[Neue Sachlichkeit|Neuen Sachlichkeit]] |GEBURTSDATUM=[[21. Mai]] [[1897]] |GEBURTSORT=[[Dresden]] |STERBEDATUM=[[24. März]] [[1977]] |STERBEORT=[[Berlin-Zehlendorf]] }}