[Wikitext-l] [Wikitech-l] WOM

[Brion Vibber]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske at googlemail.com>wrote:

> In case you missed it all the way over there in Haifa:-)
>
>
> http://dirkriehle.com/2011/07/29/technical-report-on-wom-an-object-model-for-wikitext/
>

Their model, while interesting and an excellent reference, makes some
explicit choices that diverge from what we're currently working on:

* ugly but common structures where eg tables are opened/closed across
templates are not supported
* not all input is representable

They're not awful decisions -- and we might have made them 8-10 years ago
had anybody made an attempt to *plan* the markup language. ;) But we have an
existing data set of millions of documents that we have to support, and for
the first next-generation parser I'm hoping to basically define something
that's *very close* to how the current parser works, so that that first
decade of Wikipedia documents can be fully used with a specified parser
anytime in the future.

We can make the structures cleaner later and deprecate the old tables &
whatnot -- parser functions and such allow for beautifully nested structures
and a future wysiwyg world will take most of the low-level *markup* out of
normal editors' faces -- but for now we have to make it work with what we've
got. ;)

-- brion
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/attachments/20110802/d881a6e5/attachment.htm