2009/9/25 Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru:
XML is used to store "human-produced" rich formatted text by many standalone and web apps. XML parsers are also very strict and spitting errors. As it's been mentioned recently, XML is really good for bots, too, for that reason (the input is "error-free" tree). I wonder, If the browsers can handle tag soup, most probably MediaWiki parser can handle wikitext soup, too? Eg, instead of parsing error, properly close the nodes. The existing wikitext of millions of articles has to be converted by commandline upgrade script in case the wikitext will be abandoned. Though I wonder whether it's possible to keep wikitext editing mode for backwards compatibility by using the same method online.
Wikitext started as a shorthand for HTML. The horrible things that have happened since then are from ad-hoc additions to a parser and no formal spec, leaving the parser behaviour as, literally, the only definition.
- d.