On Fri, 09 Nov 2007 22:25:34 +0000, Thomas Dalton wrote:
Also, as noted elsewhere, wikitext is basically the set of all strings, since we don't want to generate "compilation errors".
Are we sure we don't? Making certain sequences simply invalid would solve quite a few problems. It would also be in keeping with the principle of least surprise - if we can't be sure what the user is trying to do, it's best to ask rather than guess and get it wrong.
There are some sequences that are invalid, such as unmatched XML tags. Currently, this just does the most natural thing, which causes the tag to grab the whole rest of the article. An error that caused the save to fail quickly and obviously, rather than the subtle failures during rendering, would solve a few problems.