On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 3:38 AM, Andreas Jonsson andreas.jonsson@kreablo.se wrote:
Point me to one that has.
Maybe I'm wrong. I've never looked at them in depth. I don't mean to be discouraging here. If you can replace the MediaWiki parser with something sane, my hat is off to you. But if you don't receive a very enthusiastic response from established developers, it's probably because we've had various people trying to replace MediaWiki's parser with a more conventional one since like 2003, and it's never produced anything usable in practice. The prevailing sentiment is reflected pretty well in Tim's commit summary from shortly before giving you commit access:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/71620
Maybe we're just pessimistic, though. I'd be happy to be proven wrong!
This. Tim sums up the consensus very well with that commit summary. He also made some comments on the history of wikitext and alternative parsers on foundation-l back in Jan '09[0]. Worth a read (starting mainly at ""Parser" is a convenient and short name for it").
While a real parser is a nice pipe dream, in practice not a single project to "rewrite the parser" has succeeded in the years of people trying. Like Aryeh says, if you can pull it off and make it practical, hats off to you.
-Chad
[0] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/35876/