Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com writes:
Forget about syntax -- what do we want to *accomplish*?
One thing *I* would like to accomplish is a fruitful *end* to parser discussions. A way to make any further discussion a moot point.
From the current discussion, it looks like people want to make it easier
to work with WikiText (e.g. Enable tool creation like WYSIWYG editors) while still supporting the old Wiki markup (aka, the Wikipedia installed base).
The problem naturally falls back on the parser: As I understand it, the only reliable way of creating XHTML from MW markup is the parser that is built into MediaWiki and is fairly hard to separate (something I learned when I tried to put the parser tests into a PHPUnit test harness.)
I think The first step for creating a reliable, independent parser for MW markup would be to write some sort of specification (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec) and then to make sure our parser tests have good coverage.
Then, we could begin to move from 7-bit ASCII to 16-bit Unicode because we would have a standard so that independent programmers could verify that their parser or wikitext generator was working acceptably and reliably. Once you have the ability to create inter-operable WikiText parser/generators, it seems easy (to me) to build more tools on top of that.
Mark.