On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Dirk Riehle <dirk(a)riehle.org> wrote:
As long as we're hung up on details of the markup syntax, it's going to be
very very hard to make useful forward motion on
things that are actually
going to enhance the capabilities of the system and put creative power in
the hands of the users.
Forget about syntax -- what do we want to *accomplish*?
I think you got this sideways. The concrete syntax doesn't matter, but the
abstract syntax does. Without a clear specification no competing parsers, no
interoperability, no decoupling APIs, no independently evolving components.
(Abstract syntax here means "XML representation" or structured
representation or DOM tree i.e. an abstract syntax tree. But for that you
need a language i.e. Wikitext specification and an implementation of a
parser as of today doesn't do the job.)
[snip]
In order to have a visual editor or three, combined
with a plain text
editor, combined with some fancy other editor we have yet to invent, you
will still need that specification that tells you what a valid wiki instance
is. This is the core data; only if you have a clear spec of that can you
have tool and UI innovation on top of that.
Exactly my point -- spending time tinkering with
sortof-human-readable-but-not-powerful-enough syntax distracts from thinking
about what needs to be *described* in the data... which is the important
thing needed when devising an actual storage or interchange format.
Wikis started out as *very* lightly formatted plaintext. The point was to be
fast and easy -- in the context of web browsers which only offered plaintext
editing, lightweight markup for bold/italics and a standard convention for
link naming was about as close as you could get to WYSIWYG / WYSIYM.
As browsers have modernised and now offer pretty decent rich-text editing in
native HTML, web apps can actually make use of that to provide formatting &
embedding of images and other structural elements. In this context, why
should we spend more than 10 seconds thinking about how to devise a syntax
for links or tables? We already have a perfectly good language for this
stuff, which is machine-parseable: HTML. (Serialize it as XML to make it
even more machine-friendly!)
If the web browsers of 1995 had had native HTML editing, I rather suspect
there would never have been series-of-single-quotes to represent italics and
bold...
-- brion