Brion Vibber wrote:
{{Open template}} text {{Close template}} structures are IMHO a big problem for any WYSIWYG editor. But there's no way they are going away.
If we determine they have to go, then we can devise ways to find and migrate them -- it'll be a process that takes time and a lot of helper tools, and it's necessary to not underplay that difficulty.
But it's not an intractable problem. Essentially, anything in the format:
{{start}} content1 content2 {{end}}
can be rewritten something like:
{{container| content1 content2 }}
It's equivalent, but uglier to type and work with. I don'think people would resist moving to it. You also get some problems in getting some markup because you no longer are in the first line, don't remember exactly.
Now, it may well be feasible to actually let the table rows just sit there in the parse tree and coalesce them into the adjacent table during final HTML transformation or something, but if that's not practical to do in the parser & translation layers it shouldn't be impossible to migrate.
diebuche moved tables to an AST-like structure recently. I wonder if it's still efficient enough for wikipedia, though.