[Foundation-l] EBNF of Wikitext

[Magnus Manske]

On 1/22/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> When this provides a better result than our current wikisyntax when it
> comes to internationalisation there might be something to it. As you may
> know the use of two quotes to indicate italics breaks the usage of these
> same two quotes in languages like Neapolitan.
>
> When it provides this better result, there might be something to it.
> Otherwise to me it is a hopeless "see how clever we are" exercise never
> mind how "standard" it is. A standard that does not take
> internationalisation seriously is useless in an international
> environment like the Wikimedia projects.

EBNF is not a replacement for or variation of wikisyntax. It's a
different approach for a parser that understands the /current/
wikisyntax. That would
* clean up the mess that is the current parser
* allow the parser to be generated from EBNF automatically in
C/C++/C#/Perl/whatever
* ease generation of different output formats, such as XML (or PDF or
docbook or...)
* avoid most of those little implementation bugs that come with manual
parser writing

Magnus