On Fri, Nov 30, 2007 at 10:52:28AM -0500, Monahon, Peter B. wrote:
Two, we tend to discover how things work in spite of erroneous, presumptive, naive instructions. I already have begun to discard the "rule" that bold happened between three apostrophes. Instead, I've discovered a hierarchy of toggles. Three apostrophes toggle bold to the other state. Two apostrophes toggle italics to the other state. The parser makes it decisions on how to interpret duplicate punctuation at the END of any code that matches it's look-up-table, or at the first "word barrier" transition. Or does it? Cut and paste this into any sandbox page and explore:
And here, I believe you pin down preciselt what Steve's on about (me, too): decreasing the effort necessary for users to build a mental model of how Wikitext works, which will make it easier for them to use.
That this will make it easier to parse as well, is merely a side effect.
My personal assertion, which Steve was wise enough to stay clear of for the moment, was that the number of people who *will* learn wikitext far exceeds the number who already have, and that therefore this regularization should be much steeper than might otherwise be indicated... but this thought hasn't carried the day.
Yet. :-)
Cheers, -- jra