On 5/12/05, Nicolas Weeger nicolas.weeger@laposte.net wrote:
- Current syntax: '''italic''plain => '<i>italic</i>plain
- Proposed syntax: '''italic''plain => <b>italic<i>plain</i></b>
- Previous behaviour with new syntax: <nowiki>'</nowiki>''italic''plain
For the record, I shall say that I fully expect riots on w:fr: if this new behaviour becomes mandatory :)
Some versions, months ago, did require the <nowiki> tag, and it was really afwul to manage. And we'd also need to *fix* all pages with this syntax, and we can't really fix automatically, need to check on a case-by-case basis.
Not quite true; it could be fixed automatically by having the existing parser code apply the rule that it does now, and write a <nowiki> around the ' that it interprets literally. It wouldn't be quite semantically perfect, but articles would keep their appearances (and it could even be applied before/without removing the offending code). I agree that <nowiki> is somewhat unwieldy, but it's a solution to the problem that already exists (and always has) and doesn't require mangling the grammar so that it's imposible to know whether ''' means ''' or not.
A slightly more radical approach that just crossed my mind would be to add a token reminiscent of TeX's "/" which would produce no output, but break up tokens. For the sake of readability in this email, let's imagine it's ";"
* l';''italic''bold => "l'<i>italic</i>bold" * l'';'italic''bold => "l<i>'italic</i>bold"
gives you full control without the 17 characters of <nowiki></nowiki>.