tarquin wrote:
What do we use HTML for?
I doubt that anybody can come up with a complete list from memory; I'm often suprised to see a new use of HTML when I come across it.
We should go through each HTML tag that we currently pass through, one by one, and decide how to make it a wiki markup. (Possibly wiki markup that looks just like an HTML tag -- I still think that this is perfectly reasonable for rarely used markup like <br> and <i> -- but it still needs to be parsed as wiki markup, not just passed through unparsed.) Then we need to search for all appearances in the text (a case insensitive search for "<%s>", "<%s ", and "<%s\n" in C notation) and translate every instance into the new syntax (if necessary) -- or agree that we will not support the effect being done (quite possible for some uses of <font>, for example).
Actually, we should probably search for uses in the first step, so that we can make all necessary decisions right up front; but we'll still need to search again just before changing the code. To avoid unnecessarily extended discussions over and over again, we make all of the decisions on, say, [[meta:HTML_to_wiki]] (there may well already exist a meta page along these lines), and direct people there if they ask about it on <wikitech-l>.
-- Toby