Why not add *this* and _this_ to the "Extended MediaWiki" markup, then just make vanilla MW syntax one of the many light-markups supported? So when you author an article, you can pick from MediaWiki, Extended MediaWiki, Markdown, Textile, APT, Usenet, Plain Text, XHTML, etc?
I'm only partly kidding. It makes sense for Wikipedia to have exactly one supported syntax, but for other wikis, having the flexibility to pick a markup would alleviate these kinds of disputes. Perhaps putting in enough hooks to allow extension devs to make their own parser grammars? (Not sure if there are enough hooks for this now btw).
More seriously though, I think adding any new magic to the MediaWiki parser is just fueling the fire surrounding the parsability of the syntax - which I am against. Also, regarding parsability, has anyone attempted to write Doxia[1] plugins for MW syntax? I'm considering giving it a whirl if there isn't any prior art.
[1] http://maven.apache.org/doxia/
On 2/12/07, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 08:25:54PM +0000, Rob Church wrote:
On 12/02/07, Simetrical Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
Only a vanishingly tiny percentage of our target audience (which is all of humanity) is familiar with Usenet-style emphasis conventions.
It's bloody criminal, isn't it?
I know you're being at least 50% snarky there, Rob, but I a) think that it is, in fact, criminal, and b) still don't think that penalizing the people who do is a good idea, absent overwhelming other evidence.
And let's just note here that *Microsoft Word does this translation in realtime during input*, assuming you don't turn it off.
So, clearly, it's not *that* abstruse.
Cheers,
-- jra
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
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