On 4/6/07, Jeff V. Merkey jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com wrote:
A lot of this needs to be detected by MediaWiki up front when the pages are saved rather than waiting for tidy to clean it up later. I deal with this breakage every time I import and test a dump file. MediaWiki could avoid a lot of these issues by detecting garbage when the pages are saved.
This is a philosophical issue about how Wiki works. The lack of hard syntax rules that people must conform to facilitates discover and greatly softens the learning curve. ... it also means that our content will perpetually be rubbish syntactically.
I used to find this very distasteful. But a lot more time thinking about it, I don't feel as bad about it. What is bad is that our syntax is not well defined (and is, in fact, partially defined by tidy of all things) ... this means that making changes while remaining bug to bug compatible is nearly impossible.
I don't think syntax checking is a desired feature, ... but having a grammar which is well defined enough that changes can be made without breaking dependencies on unexpected aspects of our behavior would be very desirable. ... but doing so without breaking compatibility with the existing syntax is probably impossible.