On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Daniel Schwen <lists(a)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).