* David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> [Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:43:14 +0000]:
On 28 December 2010 16:54, Stephanie Daugherty
<sdaugherty(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Not only is the current markup a barrier to
participation, it's a
barrier to
> development. As I argued on Wikien-l, starting over with a markup
that
can
> be syntacticly validated, preferably one that is XML based would
reap
huge
rewards in the safety and effectiveness of
automated tools - authors
of
tools like AWB have just as much trouble making
software handle the
corner
cases in wikitext markup as new editors have
understanding it.
In every discussion so far, throwing out wikitext and replacing it
with something that isn't a crawling horror has been considered a
non-starter, given ten years and terabytes of legacy wikitext.
If you think you can swing throwing out wikitext and barring the
actual code from human editing - XML is not safely human editable in
any circumstances - then good luck to you, but I don't like your
chances.
New templating could be implemented in parallel - not having to abandon
these terabytes. Inserting something like XSL to a wikipage should be
orthogonal to wiki templating syntax (only some of tag hook names will
be unavailable due to XSL using these). However, I do agree to you that
XML (or XSL) tag editing is a hard job, sometimes even harder than
wikitext. Wikitext is really fast way to build articles to people who
type fast enough. Wikitext for markup and links and XSL for templates,
perhaps. There is also a HEREDOC style for almost arbitrary content.
Many possible ways to have two languages in parallel.
Dmitriy