On 13/11/2007, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Why is it unacceptable? I would think users would prefer to be told what's wrong rather than have something unexpected happen.
You are not a technophobe.
Just passing through the wikitext unchanged requires the parser to work out exactly which bit has gone wrong, which is often impossible (for example, in <tag><tag></tag>, which tag has been left unclosed? Should it output "<tag>" as the contents of a tag tag, or should it output "<tag>" followed by an empty tag tag? That's assuming it can find some way of working out that it isn't meant to swallow the rest of the article. A simple error message saying "tag tag not closed", either inline when displaying the page, or as an error on save, would be much easier and much clearer.)
And if they don't already understand the jargon and don't understand what it is they haven't done according to the definition of wikitext?
- d.