On 8/4/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Sounds sensible to me. "Magic" syntax where seemingly normal-looking text gets transformed is evil, because it's unclear what's going on, and prone to breakage. MediaWiki took a great leap forward by moving from magical CamelCase links to [[marked-up links]], for example. Just about the only necessary evil I can think of is the auto-date-formatting; dates are too common to really be done any other way, although it too is slightly evil and sometimes kicks in or doesn't kick in in unexpected ways.
What about http://magic.formatting.com ? Is that a necessary evil? I suspect it's probably not that evil.
Which auto date formatting do you mean, btw? I see these constant references to it when people link stuff like [[August 8]], but we don't seem to have any settings that return a nice result like "8th of August", which is what my personal preference would be...
Using link syntax to induce special formatting is definitely not right.
Steve