On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 4:59 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
That we've multiply concluded that it will never change doesn't mean it won't; as a thought exercise, as I suggested in OtherThread, we should consider negating that conclusion and seeing what happens.
Agreed. I think part of the problem in the past is that the conversation generally focused on the actual syntax, and not enough on the incremental changes that we can make to MediaWiki to make this happen.
If, for example, we can build some sort of per-revision indicator of markup language (sort of similar to mime type) which would let us support multiple parsers on the same wiki, then it would be possible to build alternate parsers that people could try out on a per-article basis (and more importantly, revert if it doesn't pan out). The thousands of MediaWiki installs could try out different syntax options, and maybe a clear winner would emerge.
Rob