2009/9/25 Roan Kattouw <roan.kattouw(a)gmail.com>om>:
The point is that wikitext doesn't *have* parsing
errors. The parser
is very tolerant in that it tries to resolve 'invalid' and ambiguous
constructs by some combination of guessing what was probably intended
and trying not to mess up the rest of the article (the newline thing
mentioned earlier fall in the latter category). I agree that this
probably causes the weird quirks that make wikitext such a horribly
complex language to define and parse, so I think a good way to
continue this discussion would be to talk about how invalid, ambiguous
and otherwise unexpected input should be handled.
In past discussions I have noted that "tag soup" is a *feature* of
human languages, not a bug.
HTML was constructed as a computer markup language for humans.
Unfortunately, the humans in question were nuclear physicists; lesser
beings couldn't handle it.
Note how HTML5 now defines how to handle "bad" syntax, in recognition
of the fact that humans write tag soup.
Wikitext spitting errors would be a bug in wikitext, not a feature.
- d.