Ok, you're saying it is an HTML shorthand, but
that would change with
a proper grammar? Well, I'm putting together a proper grammar, so how
should it change? It probably shouldn't change at all for the moment,
so we can meet our goal of having a drop in parser that's as close as
possible to the current one.
It's just a matter of semantics. At the moment, wikitext is defined in
terms of HTML, when you finish your grammar, we can define it in terms
of what it should look like instead. A language defined in terms of
HTML is just a shorthand for HTML, a language defined in its own terms
is a language in its own right.
I'm finding a constant struggle between the goal
of matching the
current behaviour, and the knowledge that some of the current
behaviour happens purely by chance, and no one really designed it.
Yeah... I can see how that would be a struggle. I don't think there's
much we can do about it, though...