[Foundation-l] EBNF of Wikitext

[Delirium]

Łukasz Garczewski wrote:
> On 1/22/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> Hoi,
>> What the f* is an EBNF .. It does not help that you URL is wrong. Being
>> clever (ahum) I found Extended Backus–Naur form.. A question, do you
>> really think that an average Wiki editor will NOT get hopelessly
>> confused and get it hopelessly wrong as well?
>>
>> Personally I find it horribly ugly as well
>>     
>
> Virgil did not even hint at the fact that this is to be used by
> editors. You assumed that and it's most probably a wrong assumption.
>
> Maybe it's for developers? Maybe it's for research and comparison with
> other similar markups? Maybe it's just for the fun of it?
>
> Personally, I'm intrigued. Virgil, could you elaborate on the purpose
> of this project? In what ways can it help us (and who exactly is the
> 'us' in this case :))?
>   

The current wikitext parser is basically a pile of regular-expression 
hacks, and deeply embedded within the MediaWiki codebase, which makes it 
hard to extend and also to use for other projects (like building PDFs of 
Wikipedia articles).  So there have been occasional suggestions to build 
a "real" parser in a more standard way, like by defining a grammar for 
the language.  As far as I know none have actually been completed, 
partly because Wikitext wasn't really designed with ease of formal 
parsing in mind.

-Mark