[Mediawiki-l] markup question

Thu Nov 3 15:59:28 UTC 2005

On 2 Nov 2005 17:23:40 +0100, Patrick Gundlach <pg at levana.de> wrote:
> question concerning markup/parser:
>
> In a <pre> section, all markup is preserved (not interpreted), except
> for <nowiki>....</nowiki> tags. So

> Isn't this inconsistent? Or is this intentional behaviour? I am
> asking, because I write a mediawiki markup parser in Ruby and like to
> get things 'right' (whatever that means).

Well, it's not inconsistent, exactly, it's just what you might call
"markup precedence": because of the way the "parser" is coded, no 2
actions can happen "at the same time", and processing proceeds by
type, not position, so combinations will only ever "happen" one way
round.

If I remember the code rightly, <nowiki> tags are the very first thing
to be processed, because by definition their content needs to be
hidden from all other processing [looking, it seems only the optional
<html> gets done earlier]. Presumably, <pre> gets processed straight
after, since it has the same properties, but since it also acts as an
HTML <pre>, it's not the same, so can't be done at *exactly* the same
time. So <nowiki> ends up "having precedence over" <pre>, whichever
way round you nest them; by the time the <pre> tags get processed, the
<nowiki> has already been processed and vanished.

Admittedly, if you were designing the markup on logical grounds, that
wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, but it's certainly expressable as
a consistent rule.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]