[Wikipedia-l] Re: Parsing

[Steve Callaway]

Tarquin,

I (and probably most people I know (yeah, I live a sad life among the SGML,
XML and HTML communities)) would disagree strongly with Wiki markup on a
number of grounds. Firstly it's quirky and non-standard. The whole point of
the standard mark-up languages is that they're not difficult to learn and
carry both visual and informational order. H1, H2, H3 cannot be replicated
by wiki markup in any sense. We are also really going to need these once we
get to really large articles which require structure to the substance.

If you're worried about simplicity why not get a markup editor built into
the Wikipedia interface. Are there any wiki markup editors out there? None
that I've seen. Plenty of HTML markup editors though + source freely
available. No need to reinvent the wheel for HTML.

There is also no way (AFAIK) of escaping Wiki Markup other than by using
HTML <nowiki> xxx </nowiki> Ironic, huh?

The Wiki markup language varies from Wiki site to site. It is not uniform.
It will become ever more disparate until it becomes a total nonsense. (Think
I'm joking? have a crawl around some of the Wiki variants which are
springing up on a daily basis.)

"Ooh, we need a markup to do x!"
"Yes, we'll do that with fourteen asterisks and an exclamation mark..."
er.....

I can see why you like it. I hope you can see why I find it both inelegant
and limited.

rgds

Steve




----- Original Message -----
From: "tarquin" <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at nupedia.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2002 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Parsing


> Steve Callaway wrote:
>
> >It occurs to me that there is going to be an awful lot of reworking if we
> >ever do go to an XML format Wikipedia (and this definitely needs
discussion
> >at some point soon). I would have said that HTML is a more generally
> >accepted standard and that Wiki formatting is a highly localised
phenomenon.
> >You can do a lot more with HTML format than you ever can with Wiki
> >formatting.
> >
> Au contraire. The beauty of Wiki Markup is that is is independent of
> what is sent to the browser.
> When XML finally (!) hits the road, all it will take is a few tweaks to
> the script so '' is converted to a different tag instead of <I>, and we
> can go on writing wiki markup as before.
> If anything, XML is another reason for preferring wiki markup to HTML.
> Another good reason, from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks, is:
>  > It's an intelligence test of sorts to be able to edit a wiki page.
> It's not rocket science, but it doesn't appeal to the VideoAddicts
> <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?VideoAddicts>. If it doesn't appeal, they don't
> participate, which leaves those of us who read and write to get on with
> rational discourse.
>
>
>
>
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