On 11/15/07, Virgil Ierubino virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote:
What I think we should do instead is just alter the parser to output things more intuitively. This move would directly break current usage, BUT ONLY IN CASES OF *UNEXPECTED OUTPUT*. The breakage would only be on the kinds of output no one intends ANYWAY.
I think the general approach is to note the syntax that use currently and expect to work, and make sure it works the same way. When people use syntax that they don't really expect to work, we should attempt to fail gracefully, but not necessarily try too hard to produce the exact behaviour of the current parser.
In the case of [[Foo|baz<pre>wah</pre>]], no one is using this syntax, and no one would expect it to do anything in particular. Therefore we can render it pretty much however we want, though I'd be inclined to just strip out the <pre>'s. If you really really really wanted to second guess the editor (a terrible idea), they probably mean [[Foo|baz<code>wah</code>]], which works fine.
Too much magic causes the users to rely on the magic rather than just learning the syntax properly.
Steve