On 12 August 2010 08:35, Daniel Kinzler daniel@brightbyte.de wrote:
There are no errors. This is an axiom of wiki markup: any text is valid wiki text. It may not look like what you though it would, but there will be no "syntax error" messages, ever.
Yes. This is important: humans do not naturally write correctly-formed XML - they splatter a bunch of tag soup on a page, see if it rendered properly in "preview" and save when it looks good enough. That is, they learn the subtle nuances of wikitext the way they learn natural language.
Trying to turn wikitext into a proper language, with invalid formations, will not I predict work well. Unless you aim for humans mostly not to use wikitext and instead to use only WYSIWYG or other structured editors. This would be a major change in the way WMF wikis work, however, and may not fly.
We *could* however issue warnings. That could actually be helpful. Perhaps in the form of special css classes / hidden markers, that can be made visible with some JS gadget. Maybe they should even be visible per default to logged in users.
There are some examples that clearly break. If you fail to close a <ref> tag, watch the sea of red in the rendering. So you may be able to push wikitext towards being something where syntax erriors exist. If that is considered a desirable goal. (I don't consider it one, but then again I want everything and a pony, like any unreasonable human does.)
- d.