On 5/12/05, Nicolas Weeger <nicolas.weeger(a)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>.