"MinuteElectron" minuteelectron@googlemail.com wrote in message news:473B6914.1050305@googlemail.com...
Steve Sanbeg wrote:
On Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:17:48 +0000, Thomas Dalton wrote:
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.
I think it's been agreed that outright rejecting any wikitext is a bad idea. Error messages or not, the parser has to at least try.
We don't need error messages; just a way to interpret the syntax without too much lookahead. The combination of ambiguous syntax and nesting is what makes this hard. It's already been decided that we can't change
the
ambiguous syntax. But it seems like things that aren't much used, like the nesting, may still be on the table.
Why would you remove the nesting, it is highly useful, saves a lot of time, and forcing it to be done without nesting would confuse non-technical users. What would be the purpose of removing a useful feature? The discussions seams to be swaying more towards ease of documentation\programming rather than usability which should be the primary goal.
Agreed. Nesting is used a lot. E.g.
'''''Note:''' this has not yet been verified.''
Removing it is, imho, unthinkable.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)