LDC wrote:
http://www.piclab.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_Text_Syntax
So as I said, this is a vision. I invite comment and criticism. But I think it's important to Wikipedia's future that we do a good job of this.
I agree - but when you said "ALL HTML is forbidden" I went ahead and looked at the table specification part of your document and saw some things that seem rather Spartan to me. For example, the document doesn't indicate whether or not nested tables would be allowed and it doesn't seem to say how one would do bgcolor-type cell fills, or how to set border width.
If those things cannot be replicated in wikicode then all the already-converted elements, country, ship, organism and battle tables would be broken (not to mention the main pages of fr.wiki, ja.wiki, eo.wiki and others - including a partially crippled en.wiki Main Page) . This would be a very bad thing and I for one would be not be too happy if much of the work I've done with the Elements project over the past year is destroyed (not to mention the several other WikiProjects I helped nurture).
So if the table at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium cannot be replicated pretty much as-is in wikicode then I for will have a fit (I'm sure many others will join me).
Also; if all HTML is going to be 'forbidden' then what do we do with all the HTML we already have? Fire-up the Conversion Script again perhaps (just when I was about to pass the damn thing on the Most Active Wikipedian's page! ;).
An alternative solution is to only allow HTML syntax to be rendered if it is in a table:namespace page. So the HTML table code in [[Beryllium]] could be placed at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table:Beryllium and in the Beryllium article that table can be displayed by typing [[table:Beryllium]] (much like the image:namespace now works). Your more simple table wikicode could then be used for less complex and shorter tables.
That way the dense table code now in [[Beryllium]] won't be in the way of users who are only concerned about editing the prose of the article (even a wikicode table would be dense and intimidating to many people).
A more long-term solution is to have a WYSIWYG GUI - then grandma can edit even a very complex table by clicking inside the cell she wants to write in.
Please forgive me if these things are already explained somewhere in the document - I only had time to glance at a few sections.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)