On 7/5/07, Chuck Smith <chuckssmith(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From reading the previous day's messages, I see
there are some
misconceptions about WikiCreole. It is correct that WikiCreole was
not designed for EBNF, but rather it was optimized to be as easy to
learn and use as possible for the user. A wiki parser only needs to
be written once, but people need to use it everyday.
This is more or less the attitude that MediaWiki had, early on, but it
tends to screw up interoperability badly and create a lot of
corner-cases with undefined behavior that may change randomly. It
also leads to great difficulty in making things even *easier* for
users, using WYSIWYG editors. Overall I think this is the wrong
attitude to have. But as I say, if you want to do it, that's your
business.
However, there
was once an attempt to write a grammar for Creole:
http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Grammar and there is currently a
research paper in submission (not by our institute) to WikiSym in
regards to a formal grammar for Creole.
Same for MediaWiki, only they don't really work. The language has to
be designed from the bottom up to be easily parseable if it's going to
be easily parseable.
From what I understand, there are no conflicts between
MediaWiki and
WikiCreole. The idea was that Mediawiki would have a separate "Easy
Edit" button (
http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/EditCreoleMode), so that
new users would not have to deal with seeings things like
interlanguage links, templates and tables that often scare away
first-time non-techie users. However, I think there could be a motion
for a Mixed Mode editing (
http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/MixedMode)
where users could use Creole at the same time as Wikipedia markup.
Of course, this means that on, say, the English Wikipedia, things like
quotes (usually either in <blockquote> or templated) and talk pages
(filled with :-based indentation) would be totally uneditable. If I
understand the idea of placeholders correctly, they will be replaced
by something like <<<placeholder25>>>. That raises the question of
how new users will deal with things like that interspersed in the
middle of the text (e.g., for references). At the very least they'll
certainly move stuff around inadvertently, and they may well delete
them without understanding what they are.
This also raises the question of why, if this simplified view were a
worthy cause, we couldn't just hide those and keep the rest of it as
MediaWiki markup. When you strip it down to WikiCreole's features,
it's similar enough that it seems very unlikely that there are any
usability differences.
Anyway, don't let me rain on your parade. I've said what I have to
say, that's it for me here.