Fredrik Johansson <fredrik.johansson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Why not the intuitive /italicized text/ and *bold
text*?
For any big change in syntax, there would be a cost to translate the
various wikis to the new syntax, but that only happens once. Perhaps
more importantly, there would be a significant cognitive change
involved--people (and bots) would have to get used to the new syntax.
As for the specific characters you proposed, * at the begining of a
line already means bullet; however, there is arguably a more accurate
heuristic for this than the ones people are currently
defending--basically, "does the rest of this paragraph contain an odd
or even number of stars?" Italicized text is somewhat more difficult;
sequences like foo/bar/baz aren't uncommon, and would be rendered
unintelligible by a transformation to italics.
One thing worth looking at is Kwid, the markup language of Kwiki. In
Kwid, the canonical forms of the inline formatting commands are
{*bold*}, {/italics/}, {`code`} and so on, but when it's unambiguous
(whitespace or punctuation before the leading character and after the
trailing character), the curly brackets can be omitted: *bold*,
/italics/, `code`. I don't really like a lot of things about Kwid,
but this one might be worth stealing--*if* we're really contemplating
a large syntax change.
I had a copy of Meta's cur table from 6 April 2005 lying around, so I
loaded it into MySQL for a little analysis:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE NOT cur_is_redirect;
-> 12782
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP " \\*[^\n]*\\*[ \n]";
-> 289
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP " /[^\n]*/[ \n]";
-> 291
So these sequences certainly aren't unheard of in wikitext, but
they're not terribly common. (I'd love to see somebody run this
against a few Wikipedias, btw--as I said, I only used Meta because
that's what I had handy.)
--
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent(a)brentdax.com>
Perl and Parrot hacker