On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
Well that's fine... but *getting from Eric's
example to yours* is a
problem of semantics: what did the user *mean*. Without disambiguating
rules, there may be no way to tell.
There is in a WYSIWYG editor, because the user will make sure that
what's displayed is what he wants. :)
Fine, but a) those are not the only problems he's
having, and b) No
[[Flag Day]]s.
a) They're the only problems he's having with constructing a formal
grammar, which is all I was talking about, and b) why not, provided i)
the current parser is kept as a legacy and modified to convert to the
XML format rather than straight to HTML and ii) the XML can be
converted into roughly the current wikitext on demand for those who'd
prefer to work with it? The goal would still be accomplished, in that
reusers would have a much easier time dealing with our data (yes, I
know that's not my original stated goal).
But c) I can see we're likely never going to agree on even this
watered-down version of my argument, and d) what we think probably
doesn't matter unless one of us is willing to try writing up an
implementation, so e) I think it's best to drop this line of
discussion (again, and yes I know I was the one who re-brought it up).