2009/9/25 Roan Kattouw <roan.katt...@gmail.com>: > The point is that wikitext doesn't *have* parsing errors. The parser > is very tolerant in that it tries to resolve 'invalid' and ambiguous > constructs by some combination of guessing what was probably intended > and trying not to mess up the rest of the article (the newline thing > mentioned earlier fall in the latter category). I agree that this > probably causes the weird quirks that make wikitext such a horribly > complex language to define and parse, so I think a good way to > continue this discussion would be to talk about how invalid, ambiguous > and otherwise unexpected input should be handled.
In past discussions I have noted that "tag soup" is a *feature* of human languages, not a bug. HTML was constructed as a computer markup language for humans. Unfortunately, the humans in question were nuclear physicists; lesser beings couldn't handle it. Note how HTML5 now defines how to handle "bad" syntax, in recognition of the fact that humans write tag soup. Wikitext spitting errors would be a bug in wikitext, not a feature. - d. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
