On 8/10/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
If you "ditched the wikitext" you would end up storing metadata in some other form, like additional XHTML attributes, comments or something. Meaning a whole new grammar to define?
A whole new *grammar* to define, to a point, but no need to define a *syntax*, because it would all use XML syntax. Not only is that simple (and, ergo, fast) to parse, there are parsers available for it in virtually any language you want. What's more, client-side parsing would take less time than for *any* possible nonstandard syntax, because major browsers have built-in XML parsers that are made accessible to Javascript: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_parser.asp. These are, of course, written in a language like C, which would execute probably 50 to 1,000 times faster than equivalent Javascript code.
(For those who don't quite get what XML is, it basically means that instead of [[Target page|displayed text]] we'd have something like <wikilink target="Target page">displayed text</wikilink>. Of course, you won't have to look at it. ;) )