-----Original Message----- From: wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sheldon Rampton Sent: 07 March 2007 18:23 To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] AJAX and .aspx as technologies for MediaWiki?
Simetrical wrote:
I don't think it's realistic to expect total lack of change in the parser anyway: often it's a good idea to tweak parser output slightly to add new classes,
style things
a bit better, or whatever.
I think it helps to break things down conceptually into three categories: input format, storage format, and output format.
STORAGE format should be extremely well-defined and stable, hence XML.
There could be (and probably should be) a variety of INPUT formats: wikitext, WYSIWYG, etc., each of which is defined through conversion rules that turn them back and forth into the storage format.
The could also be a variety of OUTPUT formats. In addition to the current HTML, there could also be an audio output format, a "plain text" format, maybe a "summary" format (consisting of the lead paragraph and a table of contents for the rest), and probably some others I haven't thought of. Again, these would be defined through conversion rules.
I imagine there would be some third-party development of input and output formats for a variety of uses.
MediaWiki is in constant development, so nothing is stable. And therefore any third parties are going to be playing catch up, almost constantly.
Jared