On 3/7/07, Sheldon Rampton <sheldon(a)prwatch.org> wrote:
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.
XML is more of a data interchange than storage format. If you're
storing data, and the software which is using it is the only source or
destination, there is no clear reason why one would use XML, unless
you're using it for data structure. But MW currently needs no
structure; you're either storing metadata (in the db) or the
article/page contents (text, with some output parsing, but just text;
also in the DB, but only for convenience of access).
If the parser is going to stay the same, then there's no reason to
change the storage format to something which requires an intermediate
parser before the output parser.
If one wants to input different formats, then they can be parsed into
the Wikitext test file via the input parser.
If one was going to write a whole new Wiki tool with Mediawiki's
general performance from scratch, then it might make sense to
reconsider whether a neutral, interchange oriented storage format like
XML makes sense. But you'd really have to see what you're talking
about doing interchange with and how, to see if it's worth it or just
pointless overhead.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com