On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 4:01 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
But it's not an intractable problem. Essentially, anything in the format:
{{start}} content1 content2 {{end}}
can be rewritten something like:
{{container| content1 content2 }}
It's equivalent, but uglier to type and work with. I don'think people would resist moving to it. You also get some problems in getting some markup because you no longer are in the first line, don't remember exactly.
'Uglier' to work with depends very much on what the tools to work with it looks like... if the result is we make it a billion times easier to maintain your infoboxes on your articles because the whole box can be treated as a unit in the editor or even handed off to a specialized infobox wizard, then I'm a lot less worried about what it _looks like_ in the markup.
Humans *shouldn't* be worrying about whether they got the whitespace or escaping right to embed one structure in another; they should be able to just edit text in the box, and the editor worries about constructing the markup properly to describe the document.
We'll be freer to make use of things like escape sequences to disambiguate embedded structures if we know that most of the time it'll be a machine, not a human that's typing the |s (or occasionally |s) or worrying about whether there's a newline in a particular place or not -- these are things that power users doing hardcore template editing can mess with, without most people needing to worry about them.
-- brion