2009/9/25 Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru:
Let's assume an odd occurence of ''' will be converted to wmf:bold and an even occurence ''' to </wmf:bold> (begin/end of the node)? Non-paired occurence will simply cause XML parsing error - there should not be uneven number of '' or '''.
The point is that wikitext doesn't *have* parsing errors. The parser is very tolerant in that it tries to resolve 'invalid' and ambiguous constructs by some combination of guessing what was probably intended and trying not to mess up the rest of the article (the newline thing mentioned earlier fall in the latter category). I agree that this probably causes the weird quirks that make wikitext such a horribly complex language to define and parse, so I think a good way to continue this discussion would be to talk about how invalid, ambiguous and otherwise unexpected input should be handled.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)