[Wikipedia-l] Re: Extension syntax vote begins

[Peter Gervai]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 10:52:32PM +0530, Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 10:51:12AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
>  
> > The vote therefore has a systemic bias towards the programmers, but they 
> > are not the intended audience. Also, most of the programmers 
> > (apparently) vote on what they prefer (as opposed to what they think 
> > unsavvy people might prefer).
> > 
> > There is no other way I can imagine that people seriously prefer 
> > <math>x^2</math> over simple-and-quick [!x^2!] or [$x^2$] or whatever. 
> I think its just the opposite. Only perl programmers would prefer so
> many special characters rather than words to delimit things.
> 
> Most people are familiar with html these days, so "unsavvy" people
> won't be frightened by <math></math>

I am a perl programmer and I disprefer [# .. #]. I could probably memorize
them, but I don't really want to, and I don't believe laypersons could. If it
reads "math" then it is obvious that what it is, you don't have to memorize. 

Test: <movie>...</movie>  Try to guess what kind of media is handled by this
imaginary tag. ;-)

That's why.
grin