On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Erik Rose <erik(a)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