On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 10:17:28AM -0600, Jim Wilson wrote:
Steve Bennet wrote:
Heh, I'd assumed you would add // and __, too. But then, I was coming at this from a kind of pure wiki syntax point of view, where as much syntax as possible is just doubled punctuation: ** // __ {{ [[ == . Though I now see that __ would conflict with some magic words like __NOTOC__.
Actually the underscores wouldn't conflict since the hook happens so late in the process. By the time the hook is run, those have already been removed.
And MW is smart enough to, for example __leave this alone__ since "leave this alone" is not a recognized magic word.
Thanks for the addendum; that was my next question. Of course, overlapping markup like that leaves you open to the possibility someone will expand the magic word list in a later release -- it's *still* not the best idea...
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
Because the goal is to leverage what people *actually do*. I almost *never* see doubled punctuation.
That's a good point too though - I'm beginning to think I should probably take the doubles back out.
I would say so, myself.
Evan Prodromou wrote:
You should probably look at reST, a popular wiki-like text format that is based on the same formatting conventions you're trying to emulate.
Yeah - that's interesting. reST is one of many _many_ light markup languages out there - like Markdown, Textile or APT[1].
Markdown. Heh. :-)
Maybe what I should do is fix the current problems with UsenetSyntax (like clobbering through tags and affecting preformatted text blocks) by breaking it up into two extensions:
- One extension that doesn't do anything to the text itself, but adds a hook
that other extensions leverage to safely parse for their own syntax
- A demo implementation of such a leveraging extension which just so happens
to implement Usenet style syntax.
Hee. I love good factoring.
The upside of the previous plan is that I'm less likely to get bogged down in "wouldn't it be cool if's" because extension devs can make their own.
Good point.
The downside of the plan is that people might still send me "wouldn't it be cool if's", and I'd have gone through the work of abstracting the layers for no benefit.
Except that you can then say "see how easy it is to..."
Or point them to Asking Good Questions. :-)
Cheers, -- jra