Roan Kattouw schrieb:
2009/5/11 Daniel Schwen lists@schwen.de:
This sucks, but in the four years we have spend talking abotu it, no one found a way out that will not break a few million existing wiki pages.
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. Cases that break could be detected by comparing tidied HTML output from both parser versions.
Nah, well, now slam me for not reading through four years of discussions and finding out why my proposal is dumb ;-)
Actually, this makes sense, and I've heard a very similar suggestion from another developer (I believe it was Tim, not sure) at the Berlin meet-up.
Yes, if we ever want to get out of this mess, that is the way to go. The problem I see is: if we try to come up with a formalization that removes all the brokennes, we will have discussions about that to now end. Because the nicer we want the spec to be, the more stuff we have to break.
My pet peve: marcup parts comminf from templates, like |} from {{TableEnd}} or whatever. Or | from {{!}}. Getting rid of that means rewriting a lot of templates and fixing a lot of pages...
Anyway - if we seriously want to do this, there should be at least one person working on it full time, to keep things together. And pull it through. Then we have a chance.
-- daniel