----- Original Message ----- From: "Jason Richey" jasonr@bomis.com To: wikitech-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Monday, December 30, 2002 10:29 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Tex update status
I am 100% for the comments you had about changing the backend to be more generalizable. I think that a plugin type architecture for this type of thing would be ideal...
My thoughts: We currently have the <math> tags and are considering <music> and <tex>, right? At what point are we going to realize that the stuff that goes between these tags all share the same idea. That is, they are all text rendered into images and/or HTML for presentation. I think that it is crazy to add a tag every time we want to support a new renderer. We should use a single tag, and a modifier. A few possible examples:
<render type=tex>\sqrt[3]{x+y}</render> <render type=math>\sqrt[3]{x+y}</render> <render type=texvc>\sqrt[3]{x+y}</render> <render type=lilypond>\notes{r4 <a c e> c e}</render>
While this makes logical sense from a development point of view, it leads to exactly the kind of unreadable text which frightens non-programmers off. If we're going down this road, we might as well drop the Wiki mark up altogether and replace it by HTML. At least that way we'd be using a standard mark up system.
Let's not do any tag design just to make implementation easy. The goal should always be to aim at easy editing for authors, not easy code implementation for developers.
Cheers
Derek