Brion Vibber wrote:

Silas Snider wrote:

...

I've been lurking on this list for a while now, waiting for the time to actually work on the Mediawiki code. Therefore, I was very interested in the proposed summer of code project "Wikitext parser rewrite"(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2006#Wikitext_parser_rewrite)

That's probably not an appropriate project, as it would be dependent on the syntax being formally defined first (a separate project, which will require being done with community input and careful consideration of compatibility).

As an example of something I'd _like_ to change:

It would be great if template substitutions work at the syntax-tree level, rather than the source text level. This would make it much easier to work with the data programmatically, and for instance much easier to get a clean interface on a mostly-WYSIWYG-like editing system.

It would though mean that some existing template styles would need to be changed. For instance something like this:

{{cool table header}} |a row |a row {{cool table footer}}

would need to be replaced with something like this:

{{cool table| |a row |a row }}

This of course requires being able to put things like table syntax into parameters without having it explode. (Escaping? etc)

This kind of incompatible change might break many thousands of pages; it would be good for a project working on syntax cleanup to search data dumps for such problems, and see what can be relatively automatically fixed and what needs a bigger cleanup project.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)