Hi wikitext-l!
I've read http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future/Parser_plan recently, and the plans seemed strange and scary to me. In several places, there is the following stuff said: ...rich text editor which will let most editors and commenters contribute text without encountering source markup... ...further reducing the need of advanced editors to work with markup directly... ...by integrating well with a rich text editor, we reduce the dependence of editors and commenters on dealing with low-level wikitext... ..."oh there's that funky apostrophe thing in this old-style page". Most editors will never need to encounter it...
Such plans seem very scary to me, as I think the PLAIN-TEXT is one of the MOST IMPORTANT features of Wiki software! And you basically say you want to move away from it and turn MediaWiki to another Word, having all problems of "WYSIWYdnG" (...Is What Wou don't Get) editors. I don't think I need to explain the advantages of plain-text markup to core developers of MediaWiki... :)
I've patched the parser code slightly (in mediawiki4intranet) and I understand it's not perfect, so I support any effort for creating a new parser, but if it involves moving away from markup in the future fully...
So, my question is - is this all true, or did I misunderstand the plans?