On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 07:00:28AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Jan.Hidders wrote:
My grasp of the consensus (but maybe I am misremembering... perhaps this is just my grasp of my own opinion!) is that going out of our way to be HTML-free is not a good thing, but that not allowing the many html-nightmares is a good thing.
I think you are right that this was and is the consensus. Doesn't mean I can't try, does it? :-)
For example, many many many people, not just programmers, understand how to make html <b>bold</b> and <i>italics</i>. Those are intuitive and harmless. The original Ward Cunningham wiki solution of ' and '' and ''' for different things, well, that was never very intuitive and newcomers didn't know about it.
<rave> Oh, come on! How long does it take for newcomers to grasp what '' and ''' means? I agree that in itself there is nothing wrong with <b> and <i> although I personally think they are slightly less easier to read then the WikiWiki notation and I think it is always better to simply have one notation for every mark-up.
However, they are at the root of the HTML problems because once you start allowing such HTML-like mark-up the software has to decide which tags it allows and which it doesn't and if the stuff is well-formed or not and that's just hard to do. So in the beginning it simply wasn't done and because, as you said, the code was and is the law now the life of the parser has become unnecessarily difficult and some pages are more and more looking like regular hard to understand and edit HTML pages.
It really would have been so much better if right from the beginning somebody would have said: no HTML tags. It really would have. *sigh* </rave>
Of course, at this point, we do have an established userbase of writers, some of whom are known to us as regulars, but lots and lots of whom may only show up once every month to write a little bit. I think we have a duty not to change anything in a way that will astonish them.
You are right, of course, but I would say that we also have a duty towards the hundreds of thousands potential contributers that will come to visit us in the future. And seeing how Wikipedia is happily humming along at the moment and even getting a facial soon, I'm quite sure that they will come. :-)
-- Jan Hidders