On 5/11/05, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason avarab@gmail.com wrote:
Here are a few syntax features that I propose we deprecate for 1.5, the reasons are mainly to simplify the the wikitext to make parsing simpler.
(Hello, I'm the guy who wrote "Parsers", but now from a subscribed address)
I'd also like to suggest the removal of the workaround (occupying most of the first half of parser.php doQuotes) dealing with confusion of quotes-as-text and quotes-as-markup within words. In other words, the workaround provides that "l'''italic''plain" renders as "l<i>italic</i>plain".
My feelings are that this is a rather complicated workaround for a user-input error (see doQuotes() if you want to know how complicated), and that furthermore, it's bad for parsing. It introduces an ambiguity to the wikitext syntax that can't be resolved without an arbitrary amount of forward context. This makes it hard to express wikitext as a grammar, and almost as hard to parse it quickly. Hopefully its use is rather rare; would it be possible to run a scan to find out more conclusively?
Thank you for your time, Andrew