On Sun, Feb 11, 2007 at 10:02:33PM -0500, Eric Astor wrote:
Just one example - probably of the 5% very hard category:
'''''hello''' hi'' vs. '''''hi'' hello'''
Rendered in HTML, the first reads <i><b>hello</b> hi</i>, and the second reads <b><i>hi</i> hello</b>. The problem is that the meaning of the first 5 quotes changes based on the order in which the bold and italic regions close - which is not determined while scanning left-to-right.
Another example:
'''hello ''hi''' there''
MediaWiki renders this as <b>hello <i>hi</i></b><i> there</i>, properly handling overlapping formatting.
There are ways to deal with these... putting off the resolution until a later pass is the only way I know of that deals with the first one, and it's a bit touchy. Manageable, but touchy.
I know no one ever likes this question, but I'm going to ask it again anyway:
Is that problem easier or harder to deal with than whatever problems you would have if you just redefined bold to *this* and italics to _that_?
Everyone keeps saying that causes horrible collisions, but *I* don't think that most of them are that difficult to disambig.
Cheers -- jra