----- Original Message -----
From: "George Herbert" george.herbert@gmail.com
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Did anyone ever pull statistics about exactly how many instances of that Last Five Percent there really were, as I suspect I suggested at the time?
Expansion off "how many instances..?" -
The thing you want expanded, George, is "Last Five Percent"; I refer there to (I think it was) David Gerard's comment earlier that the first 95% of wikisyntax fits reasonably well into current parser building frameworks, and the last 5% causes well adjusted programmers to consider heroin... or something like that. :-)
At some point in the corner, the fix is to change the templates and pages to match a more sane parser's capabilities or a more standard specification for the markup, rather than make the parser match the insanity that's already out there.
If we know what we're looking at, we can assign corner cases to an on-wiki cleanup "hit squad". Who knows how many of the corners we can outright assassinate that way, but it's worth a go... The less used it is and harder to code for it is, the easier it is for us to justify taking it out.
Yup; that's the point I was making.
The argument advanced was always "there's too much usage of that ugly stuff to consider Just Not Supporting It" and I always asked whether anyone with larger computers than me had ever extracted actual statistics, and no one ever answered.
Cheers, -- jra