On 13/11/2007, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I think my main motivation for working on a new and better parser is to give MediaWiki room to grow. It's currently really stifled by the many layers of text replacement that take place, and developers continually express a fear of "breaking the parser". That inhibits the development of new features.
IMO the main problem is a lack of interoperability and valid alternate implementations. The syntax is currently literally defined as whatever falls out of the PHP parser. That's not good enough for the big world and people are routinely horrified when I explain that's the reason MediaWiki doesn't have all manner of obvious useful things like a WYSIWYG editor, format converters, etc.
- d.