Simetrical wrote:
On Jan 25, 2008 7:55 PM, Tim Starling
<tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Compared to conversion to WikiCreole? HTML
two-way conversion sounds a lot
more plausible to me than WikiCreole two-way conversion.
Do you think HTML two-way conversion is actually plausible, though?
(I wasn't even considering WikiCreole.)
Well, maybe without templates, and if you made your goal stability, rather
than losslessness, then it would start to get a bit more plausible. By
that I mean: the original conversion from arbitrary wikitext to HTML may
include some loss, because of the way multiple "bad" syntaxes, and one
"good" syntax, are converted to the same target annotated HTML. But
conversion from annotated HTML to wikitext would only produce "good"
syntax, which would subsequently survive round-trip conversion.
To support templates, the output would have to be very heavily annotated
indeed, to the point of including a complete copy of the source wikitext
of the page and all templates.
That's an interesting idea for the problem in general actually: a client
which understands MediaWiki wikitext intimately, and simultaneously edits
the visual form (e.g. HTML) and the wikitext as you press keys.
There is, however, a philosophical question of whether decent structural
multi-output markup can be produced by a WYSIWYG editor with untrained users.
-- Tim Starling