On Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 12:16:51PM +1100, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 12/3/07, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
My personal assertion, which Steve was wise enough to stay clear of for the moment, was that the number of people who *will* learn wikitext far exceeds the number who already have, and that therefore this regularization should be much steeper than might otherwise be indicated... but this thought hasn't carried the day.
It comes down to this:
- It would be good to have a well defined grammar for the wikitext
recognised by the parser in use. 2. It would be good for wikitext to be a sensible grammar, easy to use. 3. It would be good for MediaWiki to use a recursive descent parser rather than the current one. 4. It would be bad if MediaWiki could not recognise all the existing wikitext on the WMF sites.
As Brion has pointed out, it would be very difficult to achieve all these aims simultaneously. It turns out that 3 is hard to achieve without 1. 3 is actually easiest to achieve with 2 and 1, but without 4. So the order of implementation has to be 1, 3, 2.
I'm down with that. :-)
Cheers, -- jra