"We're going to need a real markup syntax, consistent, predictable, documented, bug free, and with all the features needed..."
But we MUST NOT violate the sacred principle of Not Invented Here, which strictly forbids the use of the markup language that has real markup syntax, consistent, predictable, documented, bug free, and with all the features needed ... HTML.
</sarcasm>
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com [mailto:wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com]On Behalf Of lcrocker@nupedia.com Sent: Friday, August 09, 2002 15:01 To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com; The Cunctator Subject: Re: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Transitioning toward a clean wiki syntax.
How about this:
[http://www...] renders (a href="http://www...%22)%5B1%5D(/a) with autonumbering, [http://www...%7Ctext] renders (a href="http://www...%22)text(/a) (the pipe can optionally be a space), and [http://www...%7C] (note trailing pipe) expands to [http://www...%7Cwww...] ?
Why not just render http://www... as www... ? I've done that for my own wikis and it looks very nice, also for mailto:'s etc.
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 of brackets is the most egregious problem in my opinion--it's an exception to the other forms of markup, it causes the punctuation problem, and it causes real coding headaches (like the bug of URLs with contained URLs, for example).
For a small, limited-purpose wiki, a limited feature set is fine and it doesn't matter if the markup language--which doesn't need to have a lot of features--is a bit awkward. But we've outgrown that. We're going to need a real markup syntax, consistent, predictable, documented, bug free, and with all the features needed for a complete general-purpose encycopedia.
Far better we should go through the pain of adjustment that will entail now, than later after we've got even more people to confuse.
[Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l