On Sat, 15 Jan 2005 12:58:42 +0100, Karl Eichwalder <ke(a)gnu.franken.de> wrote:
That's why XML editors exist. The sooner we
switch to a standard markup
language, the better. WP's markup is proprietary and very hackish.
WP's markup - or rather MediaWiki's - is a variant of the original
WikiWikiWeb's, and was designed with ease of editting (by humans) at
the very top of the agenda. There have been moves to create a
standardised wiki markup - which would in no way resemble
machine-friendly formats like XML, since the aim would still be
human-friendliness - see, for example,
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiMarkupStandard But for now,
yes, it's "proprietary" to the extent that it is not developed in
co-ordination with any outside body.
As for "hackish", though, I'm not sure I agree: the *syntax* is
perfectly good at doing what it does - which is to say, it allows
people to describe the formatting they require of a piece of text.
What's hackish is MediaWiki's *implementation* of that formatting -
the parser which isn't a parser - being as it is based on a range of
context-unaware text manipulations which continually interact in
unexpected and undesired ways, violating users' assumptions about the
syntax. The almost-developed flex/bison wiki-text parser (which
outputs, being intended for computer use, XML) demonstrates that the
syntax itself is amenable to far less hackish processing.
With a proper markup language it would not be
necessary to change ''' ->
'' -> " -> ''' -> « -> '' -> „ ->
" all the time; you would simply write
<obj>Nuremberg Castle</obj> and you are done. Once and for all. That's
only one example.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what that example refers to. Are you
meaning that wiki syntax could magically morph to suit a different
language, with different formatting conventions, so people could
copy-and-paste from one wiki to another? Or are you just saying that
the markup should be more *semantic* (I don't see anything less
"proper" about marking up what things look like; this is the way
people view data), and the example is some debate about what
formatting to use in a particular case?
I think the key problem with semantic markup is that in order to have
any advantage, it has to be both very rich and very standardised -
e.g. you'd need to have a way of saying "this text is the name of a
film", and people would need to know that this was "<movie>" and not
"<film>" (or "<movietitle>" or
"<filmtitle>", or any number of other
possibilities). If you were to impose such a scheme on something like
Wikipedia, you'd just create a tremendous learning curve.
Obviously, semantic *representation* is good, and in some cases (such
as Wiktionary, or the oft-mooted
"Wikipeople"/"Wikibiography"/"WikiFamilyTree" ideas) I have
my doubts
as to whether a wiki really is the best way to go, simply because
editting a block of text that describes its own semantic status is
rather daunting for most people. Hence, as you say, XML editors - and
more specifically, hence sites like IMDb that have subject-specific
structure hard-coded into the software and the interface (if you edit
a listing in IMDb, you never *see* the underlying representation, and
the structure is defined for you so you don't need to).
In 'de' they just invented an invisible
"personendaten" box...
Again, you've lost me; for what purpose did they create this "box", in
what sense is it "invisible", and how would XML/"a proper markup
language" deal with the same issue?
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]