Simetrical wrote:
I don't think it's realistic to expect total lack of change in the parser anyway: often it's a good idea to tweak parser output slightly to add new classes, style things a bit better, or whatever.
I think it helps to break things down conceptually into three categories: input format, storage format, and output format.
STORAGE format should be extremely well-defined and stable, hence XML.
There could be (and probably should be) a variety of INPUT formats: wikitext, WYSIWYG, etc., each of which is defined through conversion rules that turn them back and forth into the storage format.
The could also be a variety of OUTPUT formats. In addition to the current HTML, there could also be an audio output format, a "plain text" format, maybe a "summary" format (consisting of the lead paragraph and a table of contents for the rest), and probably some others I haven't thought of. Again, these would be defined through conversion rules.
I imagine there would be some third-party development of input and output formats for a variety of uses.
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