[Wikipedia-l] Transitioning toward a clean wiki syntax.

[Lars Aronsson]

lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> If we just keep adding and adding more wiki syntax on top of
> the old, we'll end up with an incomprehensible mess and code
> that's impossible to debug.  We're going to have to simplify
> the markup before we extend it, and interpreting URLs outside

What if "http:" was a namespace like "user:", you would use
[[namespace:<data>]] for all sorts of links and that would be it.
No more bare URLs and no [URL] with single brackets.  That would be a
reduction in complexity, and give you a modular design, with a new
module for each namespace that would interpret <data> following.
You could have [[tex:<data>]] for TeX math formulas and
[[ISBN:<data>]] for ISBN numbers.  The only rule for <data> would be
it couldn't contain a double closing bracket.

Existing links and patterns that fall outside of this would have to
be converted, but data has been converted before.

I haven't tried this, and don't know if it would work out.


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  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
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