On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 10:15 PM, Subramanya Sastry ssastry@wikimedia.org wrote:
When [a detailed list of stuff is] done, it become far more feasible to think of defining a spec for wikitext parsing that is not tied to the internals of mediawiki or its extensions. At that point, you could implement templating via Lua or via JS or via Ruby ... the specifics are immaterial. What matters is those templating implementations and extensions produce output with certain properties. You can then specify that mediawiki-HTML is a series of transformations that are applied to the output of the wikitext parser ... and where there can be multiple spec-compliant implementations of that parser.
I think it is feasible to get there. But, whether we want a spec for wikitext and should work towards that is a different question.
In our planning meeting (E250), we discussed this issue as a possibility for next week's ArchCom office hour (E259). We don't (yet) have a specific RFC we can point to, but this seems ripe for a discussion to answer whether we should work toward a spec. Thoughts?
Rob