On 12/14/07, Virgil Ierubino virgil.ierubino@gmail.com wrote:
I was unaware that the
:indent
markup actually used DL/DD tags. That's an awful idea. It should either
<blockquote> or <div style="margin-left: 1.5em">. Changing that immediately would have no adverse effects.
See http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4521
The definition list conversion should only happen when you begin with a semi-colon:
; definiendum : definiens
But what about:
; definiendum : definiens : et definiens et cetera
As for the thread's main question, I agree that wikitext should parse more intuitively - but this would break current pages. Currently, HTML is actually allowed inside wikitext - we can't escape it.
A limited subset of HTML is allowed, unless the $wgAllowHTML (or whatever) option is enabled, in which case, <html> blocks with *anything* (<script> included) are allowed.
Using the existence of the raw HTML aspect of wikitext as an argument for wikitext being bound to HTML is circular, however. I'm guessing the sequence went something like this:
1. Start with raw, editable HTML pages 2. Add convenient syntax for bold, italics, headings etc 3. Restrict the range of HTML allowed to prevent script kiddies
There's no particular reason that stage 4 and 5 couldn't be: 4. Add more syntax to make every thing that's possible with HTML be possible with native wiktext syntax 5. Prohibit all HTML unless some flag is enabled.
Then: 6. Adjust the interpretations of wikitext, and improve the grammar so that semantics are no longer specified in terms of HTML. (Yes, I'm looking at you, {|..|}
I think my question has been answered though: in the short to medium term, wikitext is very much bound to HTML and is defined in terms of a conversion to HTML, rather than its ultimate graphical rendering.
Steve