----- Original Message -----
From: "George Herbert"
<george.herbert(a)gmail.com>
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Jay Ashworth
<jra(a)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