[Wikipedia-l] A vision for wiki syntax, documented

[Richard Grevers]

On Thu, 15 May 2003 11:23:14 -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> 
gave utterance to the following:

>> 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.
>
> There's no provision for nested tables. I don't think there's a good 
> enough
> case for their necessity. Cell backgrounds and borders can be done with 
> styles.
>
>> 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).
>
> Yeah, that nested table is a nuisance. I'll have to think about that.
That nested table could be a separate table, particularly if we used a 
wrapper div and performed the float on that.

I suggest that we look at some way of introducing classes based on the 
semantics of the data. For example, a wiki-method of entering <span 
class="species"> - although if we go that far we may as well look at an 
xml-based wiki (<species>) using server-side XSLT with a range of standard 
and personal-choice stylesheets.

Whatever we do, the aim must be to produce valid (x)HTML and CSS, 
maximising the chances of consistent behaviour across platforms and 
browsers.
No inserting of <p>&nbsp;</p> to generate space below headers (etc).
-- 
Richard Grevers
Two most common elements in the universe: Hydrogen & Stupidity.