Quoting Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de>de>:
delirium-
This seems like a pretty hackish solution
long-term.
HTML is not hackish.
On the contrary, HTML is incredibly hackish. It is not a semantic markup
language, and attempts to make it so (CSS classes and whatnot) are hacks to try
to shove some sematic information into what is a layout language. Your
additional comments aren't even remotely related to the matter--yes, there are
free libraries to display HTML, but that only indicates it's a usable display
language, not a language for information-passing in abstract, non-layout form.
Are you seriously proposing that, say, an HTML table is a good abstract format
for information? That writing a horribly ugly parser to convert HTML to LaTeX
is the best way of typesetting wikipedia articles in LaTeX?
I agree that wikitext should be parsed once, but it should be parsed once to a
semantic format. If you must take something from the cesspool of HTML-related
technologies, XML would probably be the least offensive choice, but given that
there exist 40 years of mature technologies for parsing concrete syntax (like
wikitext) into abstract syntax trees, I don't see why we should use such a
hackish dot-com-style solution.
-Mark
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