* David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com [Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:43:14 +0000]:
On 28 December 2010 16:54, Stephanie Daugherty sdaugherty@gmail.com wrote:
Not only is the current markup a barrier to participation, it's a
barrier to
development. As I argued on Wikien-l, starting over with a markup
that
can
be syntacticly validated, preferably one that is XML based would
reap
huge
rewards in the safety and effectiveness of automated tools - authors
of
tools like AWB have just as much trouble making software handle the
corner
cases in wikitext markup as new editors have understanding it.
In every discussion so far, throwing out wikitext and replacing it with something that isn't a crawling horror has been considered a non-starter, given ten years and terabytes of legacy wikitext.
If you think you can swing throwing out wikitext and barring the actual code from human editing - XML is not safely human editable in any circumstances - then good luck to you, but I don't like your chances.
New templating could be implemented in parallel - not having to abandon these terabytes. Inserting something like XSL to a wikipage should be orthogonal to wiki templating syntax (only some of tag hook names will be unavailable due to XSL using these). However, I do agree to you that XML (or XSL) tag editing is a hard job, sometimes even harder than wikitext. Wikitext is really fast way to build articles to people who type fast enough. Wikitext for markup and links and XSL for templates, perhaps. There is also a HEREDOC style for almost arbitrary content. Many possible ways to have two languages in parallel. Dmitriy