On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 09:52:39AM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Well that's fine... but *getting from Eric's example to yours* is a problem of semantics: what did the user *mean*. Without disambiguating rules, there may be no way to tell.
There is in a WYSIWYG editor, because the user will make sure that what's displayed is what he wants. :)
Quite so. :-)
Fine, but a) those are not the only problems he's having, and b) No [[Flag Day]]s.
a) They're the only problems he's having with constructing a formal grammar, which is all I was talking about, and b) why not, provided i) the current parser is kept as a legacy and modified to convert to the XML format rather than straight to HTML and ii) the XML can be converted into roughly the current wikitext on demand for those who'd prefer to work with it? The goal would still be accomplished, in that reusers would have a much easier time dealing with our data (yes, I know that's not my original stated goal).
Well, if you could guarantee a perfect roundtrip from XML to WT, sure, I guess. But I don't know that WT is structurally clean enough to make that workable.
But c) I can see we're likely never going to agree on even this watered-down version of my argument, and d) what we think probably doesn't matter unless one of us is willing to try writing up an implementation, so e) I think it's best to drop this line of discussion (again, and yes I know I was the one who re-brought it up).
Hee. Yeah; probably.
Cheers, -- jra