Evan Martin wrote:
Sorry again for what may be a naive question, but if you're going to use HTML semantics why not just use HTML?
Any parser of wikitext at this point must understand HTML anyway, and doubly so for a renderer. I appreciate that other wiki markup intends to make the text more human-friendly, but in this particular instance I suppose it's not really possible to make image coordinates human friendly, and the proposed syntax has a one-to-one correspondence with "more complicated" HTML but with a syntax nobody has seen before.
Mainly because HTML requires URLs. We don't use those. Also the HTML can get quite complicated, for instance, on my test wiki, this:
<imagemap> Image:Test1.jpg|thumb|200px|hello rect 0 0 50 50 [[Image:Test1.jpg|test1]] </imagemap>
becomes:
<map name="ImageMap_1"><area shape="rect" href="/w2/index.php/Image:Test1.jpg" coords="0,0,25.6313131313,25.6313131313" alt="test1" title="test1" /></map><div class="thumb tright"><div class="thumbinner" style="width:202px;"><div style="position: relative;"><img src="/w2/images/thumb/f/f8/Test1.jpg/200px-Test1.jpg" alt="hello" width="200" height="206" longdesc="/w2/index.php/Image:Test1.jpg" class="thumbimage" usemap="#ImageMap_1"/></div> <div class="thumbcaption"><div class="magnify" style="float:right"><a href="/w2/index.php/Image:Test1.jpg" class="internal" title="Enlarge"><img src="/w2/skins/common/images/magnify-clip.png" width="15" height="11" alt=""/></a></div>hello</div></div></div>
Using ImageMap you get all the complexity of MediaWiki image links for free.
-- Tim Starling