On 04.01.2011 22:39, Brion Vibber wrote:
In order to have a visual editor or three, combined with a plain text editor, combined with some fancy other editor we have yet to invent, you will still need that specification that tells you what a valid wiki instance is. This is the core data; only if you have a clear spec of that can you have tool and UI innovation on top of that.
Exactly my point -- spending time tinkering with sortof-human-readable-but-not-powerful-enough syntax distracts from thinking about what needs to be *described* in the data... which is the important thing needed when devising an actual storage or interchange format.
Perhaps we should stop thinking about "formats" and start thinking about the document model. Spec an (extensible) WikiDOM, let people knock themselves out with different syntaxes to describe/create it. The "native" format could be serialized php objects for all I care.
-- daniel