Since the subject seems to have flared up again, I'm writing up my vision of the future of wikitext syntax. I think the desire of some here for double-spaced lists and the clarity of the spec can be reconciled by using a line-break syntax. I like the suggestion "\" (double backslash, in case your mailer screws that up).
So here's how it might work: within a line, "\" gets replaced by a BREAK element inline, so it can be used anywhere (inside headings, tables, etc.). When on a line all by itself, a BREAK element is added to the currently-open block-level element, which then remains open. Any totally blank line closes the element (as it does now).
So,
# first
# second
will produce
1. first
1. second
just as it does now. But
# first \ # second
will produce
1. first
2. second
or to be precise,
<ol><li>first <br> </li><li>second </li> </ol>
Likewise,
Blah blah
Blah blah...
is rendered as
<p>Blah blah</p> <p>Blah blah...</p>
but
Blah blah \ Blah blah...
becomes
<p>Blah blah <br> Blah blah...</p>
BTW, I did look at the links provided for other efforts at unifying syntaxes, but they both seemed to me to be too complex and too different from out current syntax to be practical here. I really think I can make a syntax that is dead simple, not a drastic change, and more powerful. I'll post the URL here when I finish the writeup.
I think it's much more important to be able to produce nice PSs/PDFs from wiki markup than to introduce even more magic into it. It's magical enough as is and most people don't have ease-of-use problems with it, but we still don't have any way of doing high-quality printing.
I think it's much more important to be able to produce nice PSs/PDFs from wiki markup than to introduce even more magic into it. It's magical enough as is and most people don't have ease-of-use problems with it, but we still don't have any way of doing high-quality printing.
Actually, that's right at the top of the document I'm writing as one of the goals of the syntax. That's why, for example, I'm specifying output in terms of a DOM, not just HTML.
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
I think it's much more important to be able to produce nice PSs/PDFs from wiki markup than to introduce even more magic into it. It's magical enough as is and most people don't have ease-of-use problems with it, but we still don't have any way of doing high-quality printing.
Any idea how this should work? I tested to get it converted to LaTeX, but HTML tables are very complicated to convert. OK, they are nearly the only problem, to be correct.
Smurf
Any idea how this should work? I tested to get it converted to LaTeX, but HTML tables are very complicated to convert. OK, they are nearly the only problem, to be correct.
DocBook does tables well. It should be reasonably simple to render wikitext as XML with the DocBook DTD, then produce PDF from that using something like FOP.
On Thu, 8 May 2003 19:53:07 -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com gave utterance to the following:
Since the subject seems to have flared up again, I'm writing up my vision of the future of wikitext syntax. I think the desire of some here for double-spaced lists and the clarity of the spec can be reconciled by using a line-break syntax. I like the suggestion "\" (double backslash, in case your mailer screws that up).
So here's how it might work: within a line, "\" gets replaced by a BREAK element inline, so it can be used anywhere (inside headings, tables, etc.). When on a line all by itself, a BREAK element is added to the currently-open block-level element, which then remains open. Any totally blank line closes the element (as it does now).
That doesn't solve the problem of wanting to put a string of block elements within a list item (perfectly legitimate HTML)
(Richard Grevers lists@dramatic.co.nz):
That doesn't solve the problem of wanting to put a string of block elements within a list item (perfectly legitimate HTML)
You can still put lists inside a list item; you just can't put paragraphs or PREs. I'll have to think about how big a problem that is, if any.
It's certainly /not/ my intention for wikitext to be able to represent any possible DOM--just the most useful, powerful subset that keeps it simple enough for newcomers to edit.
Lee Daniel Crocker schrieb:
So here's how it might work: within a line, "\" gets replaced by a BREAK element inline, so it can be used anywhere (inside headings, tables, etc.). When on a line all by itself, a BREAK element is added to the currently-open block-level element, which then remains open. Any totally blank line closes the element (as it does now).
So,
# first
# second
will produce
first
second
just as it does now.
I still haven't seen an article where this makes any sense.
But
# first \ # second
will produce
first
second
It's just a bit less ugly than
# first <br><br> # second
But I do agree that we need something to replace the <br> tags, because they are needed in some rare cases (but are overused - at least in the German Wikipedia - in normal article text).
I appreciate efforts in making things cleaner and more standardized, but I think that it's more important to keep editing simple and intuitive.
Kurt
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org