Hey, all —
Currently TiddlyWiki implements plain-text wikification by applying
WikiText parsing to generate a DOM, then extracting and concatenating any
text-widgets in the DOM while discarding everything else. While this
functionality is very useful, it has some tricky drawbacks — wikification
involves (often) unnecessary work processing irrelevant parse rules, and
anything resembling an <element> or //wikitext markup will be stripped out,
when this might be very undesirable (eg, when encountering JavaScript or
C++ comments).
I'd like to propose an alternative mode where only those parse rules which
are applicable to plaintext are considered — that is, widgets,
transclusions (including lists), variables and a few other items. That
way, we can write things like this (a method stub generator):
<$list variable=class filter="[tag[Class]]">
<$list filter="[tag[Method][tag<class>]]">
// {{!!summary}}
{{!!return_type}} {{!!name}}({{!!parameters}}) {
}
</$list>
</$list>
I'd like to propose, further, that this functionality be available for
attributes. This will eliminate several situations where it's necessary to
use macros or $wikify, replacing these mechanisms with a more efficient,
briefer, pre-parsable expression. As noted by Jeremy, one of the most
common user mistakes involves expecting wiki syntax inside quoted strings
(or imported via macro/transclusion) to work in an attribute... Things
like title="my name is {{!!name}}". I see very few reasons (aside from
compatibility) why they shouldn't work as expected!
A conservative approach could mandate a double-equals syntax or an
alternative quotation style for wikified attributes:
<div style=="size: {{!!size}}px;">
...Though if I'm to be honest I would prefer to see all attributes parsed
by default with an alternative syntax for "direct" values. Perhaps I'm too
radical. :)
I don't think wikification needs to change much to implement this — another
parse mode, with a smaller ruleset. The tricker part of the implementation
is getting widgets to parse imported text according to the proper rules.
To that end, I suggest that the namespace variable could be used to
determine parsing behavior for imported text. In the future this might
also be leveraged to keep inappropriate elements out of <math> and <svg>
namespaces...
With these changes, I believe TiddlyWiki's logic would become more powerful
and, crucially, more consistent, helping newcomers to learn it with fewer
"gotchas" and making it simpler for experts like me to build complicated
constructs. I also think it's an essential piece of the puzzle for
evolving TiddlyWiki beyond macro dependency.
Interested to hear others' thoughts.
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