Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> writes:
Forget about syntax -- what do we want to
*accomplish*?
One thing *I* would like to accomplish is a fruitful *end* to parser
discussions. A way to make any further discussion a moot point.
From the current discussion, it looks like people want
to make it easier
to work with WikiText (e.g. Enable tool creation like WYSIWYG
editors)
while still supporting the old Wiki markup (aka, the Wikipedia installed
base).
The problem naturally falls back on the parser: As I understand it, the
only reliable way of creating XHTML from MW markup is the parser that is
built into MediaWiki and is fairly hard to separate (something I learned
when I tried to put the parser tests into a PHPUnit test harness.)
I think The first step for creating a reliable, independent parser for
MW markup would be to write some sort of specification
(
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec) and then to make sure our
parser tests have good coverage.
Then, we could begin to move from 7-bit ASCII to 16-bit Unicode because
we would have a standard so that independent programmers could verify
that their parser or wikitext generator was working acceptably and
reliably. Once you have the ability to create inter-operable WikiText
parser/generators, it seems easy (to me) to build more tools on top of
that.
Mark.
--
http://hexmode.com/
War begins by calling for the annihilation of the Other,
but ends ultimately in self-annihilation.