On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de wrote:
The simple (albeit ugly) solution would to add a parser version field to the revision table, drag the old parser along as 'legacy', make the new parser the default (and only) option for all new edits, and spit out a warning when you are editing a legacy revision for the first time. The warning you be made dependent on the cases that break with the new parser.
That would require specifying the new language, getting people to actually agree on it, and writing a parser for it. There doesn't seem to be enough support for such a monumental effort to actually happen.
Cases that break could be detected by comparing tidied HTML output from both parser versions.
And then what would you do? It's unlikely you could fix them all automatically. Of course, these are wikis, so fixing a reasonable number of cases by hand isn't out of the question.
Nah, well, now slam me for not reading through four years of discussions and finding out why my proposal is dumb ;-)
It's not dumb, just apparently not considered worth the effort right now by the powers that be (and I tend to agree).