Brian wrote:
This round the Usability Initiative got 800,000 dollars. That's a load of money. If the Foundation decides that it wants to fix the problem the correct way then it can. And it can start at any time! We just need to agree on a solution.
We can't fix the problem by looking backwards at the wikitext that has already been produced along with the language definition (5,000 lines of parser code) and saying that the problem is simply intractable. In fact, the problem does not depend in any way on the quantity of wikitext that has been produced - it only depends on an understanding (if not a definition) of the language as it currently exists. Hard work but not, at all, impossible.
...
- wikitext parsing would be much faster if the language was well defined and
we could use flex/bison/etc...
Have you read the archives? It has been tried. Several times. There's even a mailing list for that.
Getting a formal definition of ~90% of the wikitext syntax is easy. The other 10% drived nuts everyone trying to do it hard enough, so far.
Keep trying, but build over what's already done.