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Moin,
On Thursday 12 May 2005 09:33, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon brentdax@gmail.com writes:
Karl Eichwalder ke@gnu.franken.de wrote:
Sure, or simply use proper <b>XML markup</b>... This would have the nice side effect that it can span more than a <i>single line</i>.
Yes, I know, XML was not invented here and thus it isn't an option.
If you want to know why it was really done this way instead of muttering inflammitory remarks, see http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyDoesntWikiDoHtml.
I do not ask for HTML, I vote for XML.
- From a human point of view, XML is even worse than HTML - way to much formatting gets into the way of writing the actual content. Wiki's syntax is exactly why I love them over editing HTML/XML pages manually.
Yes, you could write the XML with some sort of WYSIWYG editor - but that is beside the point.
(If you think about it, there is a reason that we write email in plain text and not HTML, XML or anything else :)
Our all-time-morphing wiki-syntax is not user-friendly. It keeps developers busy - how boring if we would go for XML as an authoring language! No need to write yet another parser...
I do think you are slightly wrong. While parsing XML is easy, making sense of what it actually means is not so easy. And writing XML is much harder than writing plain text (which wiki syntax basically is).
The wiki-syntax is short, but not easy. Sometimes whitespace is critical, but you will never know for sure. It is a very limited presentation or layout language.
It certainly has some drawbacks. But throwing it out for XML is a solution in search of a problem :)
Best wishes,
Tels
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