Hi,
When this topic was raised before a few years ago (I dont remember
which time,
it's been continuingly discussed throughout the years) I found an idea
especially
interesting but it got buried in the mass.
From memory and imagination:
The idea is to write a new parser that is not deep in MediaWiki and
can therefor be used apart from
MediaWiki and is fairly easy to be translated to, for example,
javascript.
This parser accepts similar input as we do now (ie. '''bold''',
{{template}}, [[link|text]] etc.)
however totally rewritten and with more logical behavour. Call it a
2.0 parser without any
worries about compatibilty or old wikitext edge cases which (ab)use
the edge cases of the current parser.
This would become the default in MediaWiki for new pages created, and
indicated by an int
in the revision table (ie. rev_pv (parserversion) ). A WYSIWYG editor
can be written for this
in javascript and it's great.
So what about articles with the old paser (ie. rev_pv=NULL /
rev_pv=1) ? No problem,
the old parser stick around for a while and such articles simply dont
have a WYSIWYG editor.
Editing articles with the old parser will show a small notice on top
(like the one for pages larger than
x bytes due to old browser limits) showing an option 'switch' it. That
would result in previewing the page's wikitext
with the new parser. The user can then make adjuistment as needed to
make it look good again (if neccecary at all)
and save page (which saves the new revision with rev_pv=2, like it
would do for new articles).
Since there are lots of articles which likely will have the same
output in HTML and require no modification whatshowever
there could be a script written (either as a userbot for the end user
or as a maintenance script) that would automatically check
all pages that have the old rev_pv and compare them to the output of
the new parser and automatically update the rev_rv
field if it matches. All others would be visible on a SpecialPage for
"pages of which the last revision has an older version of the parser",
with a link to an MW.org page with an overview of a few things that
regulars may want to know (ie. the most common differences).
Just an idea :)
--
Krinkle
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