On 12/3/07, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
My personal assertion, which Steve was wise enough to
stay clear of for
the moment, was that the number of people who *will* learn wikitext far
exceeds the number who already have, and that therefore this
regularization should be much steeper than might otherwise be
indicated... but this thought hasn't carried the day.
It comes down to this:
1. It would be good to have a well defined grammar for the wikitext
recognised by the parser in use.
2. It would be good for wikitext to be a sensible grammar, easy to use.
3. It would be good for MediaWiki to use a recursive descent parser
rather than the current one.
4. It would be bad if MediaWiki could not recognise all the existing
wikitext on the WMF sites.
As Brion has pointed out, it would be very difficult to achieve all
these aims simultaneously. It turns out that 3 is hard to achieve
without 1. 3 is actually easiest to achieve with 2 and 1, but without
4. So the order of implementation has to be 1, 3, 2.
Steve