----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark A. Hershberger" mah@everybody.org
The problem naturally falls back on the parser: As I understand it, the only reliable way of creating XHTML from MW markup is the parser that is built into MediaWiki and is fairly hard to separate (something I learned when I tried to put the parser tests into a PHPUnit test harness.)
I think The first step for creating a reliable, independent parser for MW markup would be to write some sort of specification (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec) and then to make sure our parser tests have good coverage.
The last time I spent any appreciable time on wikitech (which was 4 or 5 years ago), *someone* had a grammar and parser about 85-90% working. I don't have that email archive due to a crash, so I can't pin a name to it or comment on whether it's someone in this thread...
or, alas, comment on what happened later. But he seemed pretty excited and happy, as I recall.
Cheers, -- jra