On 13/11/2007, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/11/2007, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Why is it unacceptable? I would think users would prefer to be told what's wrong rather than have something unexpected happen.
You are not a technophobe.
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And if they don't already understand the jargon and don't understand what it is they haven't done according to the definition of wikitext?
Error messages can be verbose and helpful. Look at how helpful the W3C XHTML markup validator is when it finds errors.
A good solution here would be to always "do the best you can" and output something, no matter how unexpected, but APPEND to the output (in some fashion) some warning messages about invalid or likely-invalid syntax. Technophiles can clear these up, technophobes can ignore them.