[Wikitech-l] about changing edited text

why can't we replace them article? I just have two objections: First, it violates the principal of least surprise; the user doesn't get the same thing upon a re-edit that they left during the last edit. This is particularly annoying for people who are putting complicated tables into articles (cf. [[Beryllium]] and [[Periodic Table]]) -- if they do one thing wrong, POOF! Half their table <tags> suddenly turn into &lt;tags&gt; and instead of fixing one tiny mistake, they fix one tiny mistake AND change a lot of &lt;&gt;s back into <>s. Conclusion: bad for users. Second, enforcing the limited subset HTML is just a part of the wiki parsing. Doing that on save is fine, but is basically doing half the parsing job and caching that, then doing the other half when we display the page. Why stop there, when we could just parse the wiki-specific code while we're at it and save the final result? Conclusion: what exactly is our goal here? To save processing time on page load? This is most effectively done by caching the completely parsed version, both HTML and wiki -> HTML.