On 11/9/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Backwards compatibility. The main suggestion I've seen is rewriting
Sure, with the bulk of sensible syntax that is being used. Attempting to duplicate the behaviour of the parser in dubious, ill-defined areas is a bad idea.
the parser in such a way as to make it behave like the old one in
everything except a few unavoidable corner cases (bold italics is not a corner case). If we're going to make significant changes to the way
Bold italics, as in a sentence with some ''''bold italics''''' in it is not a corner case. Some'''really ''really'' '''''we'ird''''''...uses of apostrophes are beyond corner cases. A corner implies the meeting of two well-defined edges. These are more like fuzzy grey area cases.
wikitext is rendered, then we don't want to start with writing a
grammar for the existing parser - we should start with writing a grammar for how we'd like the parser to be, and forget about the existing parser completely. That would, however, break a large number of existing pages on a large number of websites and would quite likely
Let's say that 90% of articles are composed of just 20% of the syntax. So let's write a grammar for 50% of the syntax, and build a parser to match. That way we break few pages but can still trim off dead wood for future growth.
result in us all being lynched. Depending on what changes we make, we
might be able to implement automated conversion to the new syntax, but people still aren't going to like it.
They might love it.
Steve