[WikiEN-l] MediaWiki is getting a new programming language

[stevertigo]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Aryeh
Gregor<Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, contenteditable is standardized in HTML 5.  There may be other
> ways; a lot of other projects seem to manage to do good WYSIWYG
> somehow, at least in major browsers.  AFAICT, the only reason we don't
> have it is because our wikitext is a complete mess to parse
> client-side.  If we used HTML or some close analog as a storage
> format, we could have WYSIWYG almost for free.

Contenteditable - nice. "Good WYSIWIG?" Gmail?  Lots of AJAX isn't
really a good thing, is it?  I guess Google is trying to get some of
Gears into the standard. Any ideas Wikimedia wants implemented?

> AFAICT, the only reason we don't have it is because our wikitext is a complete mess to parse
> client-side.

Parseability requires context. Context requires metadata. In our case
"metadata," for lots and lots of information, would mean something
like semantic web? Metadata in current wikitext jargon means "stuff
stuck somewhere at the bottom."

A dualistic Wikitext/XML metadata format maybe? Links for example
would still have the same bracket form, but would also need something
in its metadata to indicate universal location:  <site
prefix="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/">. One idea is that metadata in
XML form can be part of the raw wikitext, but would be hidden in the
standard edit mode on a Mediawiki. A different edit mode shows the XML
along with the wikitext.

In fact it seems a lot of this parsing or processing idea can be
handled in metadata. I want my audio player, for example, to
automatically make intelligent EQ adjustments per song, instead of
doing it by hand for each song.  Sound profile analysis on my tiny
player is not possible.  Sound profile analysis during file creation
and then encoding the abstractions into the metadata would take a bit
longer, but would also mean that even a tiny player, without any
processing or parsing at all, can do reasonably good audio shaping
just base on those abstractions.

-Steven