Would it add anything to this debate if I said that, in discussion with
publishers, OLPC has found vehement objection to the ''' and ''
bold/italic syntax, and strong support for using * and / instead?
- Eric Astor
Daniel Arnold wrote:
On Wednesday 14 February 2007 10:42:47 Chuck Smith
wrote:
Another benefit of changing the double single
quotes and triple single
quotes to // and ** respectively is that it would be a small step to
making MediaWiki markup more Creole-compatible (
www.wikicreole.org).
Also, it seems like a conversion script for just these two elements
would not be that difficult to write. What could be potential
complications?
I don't want to disrupt you but I definitely like the ' syntax and I am not
willing to stop using it.
Why?
'' get used especially for highlighting of single words words or short
sentences of other people. So it is used very much for quick and
dirty "inline"-quoting. You probably can argue that " '' are hard
to
distinguish and that a proper quote needs " (well proper quotes use a bunch
of other characters not on our standard keyboards ;-) beside italic.
Another point is that * syntax clashes with lists. Lists with * are a really
intuitive thing. Do not mix them with something else (for example what about
italic in a list, something I really use often). Something like ** [space] *
is not going to work. Never.
So although the current mediawiki syntax has its disadvantages, the core
syntax (I don't talk about templates) is very much balanced and is causing
very few problems withing our limited common standard character set.
And of course Usenet doesn't count. It is about exchanging arguments and not
about creating articles.
Arnomane
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