At the moment, changing the parser is akin to playing Russian Roulette.
I tend to think of it as doing brain surgery with live electrical wires - but to each his own I suppose ;)
-- Jim
P.S. zzzzZZZAP!
On Nov 13, 2007 9:45 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/11/2007, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
The except to that is where crazy, unuseful syntax is actually a hindrance to the definition of an EBNF grammar and its implementation, as we've discussed earlier.
Oh yeah, that's wacky.
Incidentally, I'm making good progress on the grammar. I've merged in most of what was at meta, so at least there is only *one* grammar now (though part of it is EBNF and the rest is BNF). http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec/BNF/Article A recurring question is who is actually going to write this parser though. Parser.php is 5000 lines and sanitizer.php another 1300. And probably other files I don't even know about. We're talking about months of work in the dark, with no feedback, and no guarantee that it will even get used. We're going to have to come up with a better coding process than "you write the code and when you're done we'll look at it".
If you can write a spec code can be generated from, that passes the current parser tests, people will *dive* upon it to do cool things with (WYSIWYG, C-based parsers, format converters, etc., etc.), even if it doesn't go into MediaWiki as used on Wikimedia. I've cc'ed this to mediawiki-l for greater outside interest.
- d.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l