On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:27:41 -0500, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 02:02:12PM -0500, Brion Vibber wrote:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
It has been proposed, informally, that wikitext be modified to prefer, and then eventually require, new markers for bold and italic text inline.
I would recommend against considering this at this time (if ever).
Hopping around changing basic syntax is probably not the thing to do when in the middle of changing the parser mechanics.
Since, as nearly as I can determine, *reliably* parsing the apostrophe related markup is unspecifiable in a formal fashion, this pretty much kills the idea completely, as far as I can see.
Parsing of the pathological cases doesn't seem specifiable, but a simplified version probably would be.
What if we only allowed ''italic'', '''bold''' and ''''bold italic'''', and required a separator between consecutive markup. I.e. ''a''<s/>'''b''' => <i>a</i><b>b</b>; ''a'''''b''' => <i>a'''</a>b<b>..?
What if we didn't allow nesting, so ''italic and '''bold''''' had to be written as ''italic and ''<s/>''''bold''''?
That would probably go along way toward making it specifiable, without affecting 99% of the current text.