On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Erik Rose erik@mozilla.com wrote:
This is one of the most important and hotly debated questions abotu the new parser design: should it allow syntactically incomplete templates, or not?
Yes, it's got all sorts of wonderful technical advantages: a DB-less translation from markup to DOM is nothing to be sneered at. Though I can throw out this cautionary tale: our old MW parser implementation didn't allow these "partial" templates, and our writers have spent maybe a dozen hours fruitlessly trying various crazy ways to factor up collections of common bullet points for use in lists of instructions.
There is the tempting but unclean (unclean!!) option of disallowing partial templates, then cleaning up certain constructs afterwards. A series of <ul></ul> nodes can be merged into one in DOM or text/regexp etc.
That would allow for mostly hack-less templates and clean parsing, at the price of bespoke markup magick fixes in the end. Just sayin'...
Magnus