On 8/14/06, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, You misrepresent me when you say that I want the parser as is hidden under a WYSIWYG interface. I want the parser fixed .. I do not want us to use characters like the quote and the pipe. People who are using MediaWiki are not programmers. They do not need to carry the bagage of UNIX. The consequence is that we need to truly lose the connection with what went before.
Out of curiosity, what would you replace the pipe with? Wikisyntax, *for a markup language*, is pretty simple. This kind of text:
==Heading== *aoeuaoeu **aoeuaoeu
is extremely intuitive and most importantly, very readable. And yet I agree with you that templates, references, image calls with lots of arguments, and tables do break down the readability, which inhibits not only people from using this advanced functionality, but people who simply want to edit existing text.
So what do we do? Do you want both a WYSIWYG interface *and* a "pipe free" syntax behind? Why? Wouldn't it be better to just have a great GUI, and the few people who choose to venture behind it to tackle the wikimarkup directly can deal with the | and other problems?
(I note, incidentally, that if one typed '' in WYSIWYG mode, the interface would presumably escape it as appropriate, fixing that particular issue...)
Steve