On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Dirk Riehle <d...@riehle.org> wrote: > > As long as we're hung up on details of the markup syntax, it's going to be >> very very hard to make useful forward motion on things that are actually >> going to enhance the capabilities of the system and put creative power in >> the hands of the users. >> >> Forget about syntax -- what do we want to *accomplish*? >> > > I think you got this sideways. The concrete syntax doesn't matter, but the > abstract syntax does. Without a clear specification no competing parsers, no > interoperability, no decoupling APIs, no independently evolving components. > > (Abstract syntax here means "XML representation" or structured > representation or DOM tree i.e. an abstract syntax tree. But for that you > need a language i.e. Wikitext specification and an implementation of a > parser as of today doesn't do the job.)
[snip] > In order to have a visual editor or three, combined with a plain text > editor, combined with some fancy other editor we have yet to invent, you > will still need that specification that tells you what a valid wiki instance > is. This is the core data; only if you have a clear spec of that can you > have tool and UI innovation on top of that. Exactly my point -- spending time tinkering with sortof-human-readable-but-not-powerful-enough syntax distracts from thinking about what needs to be *described* in the data... which is the important thing needed when devising an actual storage or interchange format. Wikis started out as *very* lightly formatted plaintext. The point was to be fast and easy -- in the context of web browsers which only offered plaintext editing, lightweight markup for bold/italics and a standard convention for link naming was about as close as you could get to WYSIWYG / WYSIYM. As browsers have modernised and now offer pretty decent rich-text editing in native HTML, web apps can actually make use of that to provide formatting & embedding of images and other structural elements. In this context, why should we spend more than 10 seconds thinking about how to devise a syntax for links or tables? We already have a perfectly good language for this stuff, which is machine-parseable: HTML. (Serialize it as XML to make it even more machine-friendly!) If the web browsers of 1995 had had native HTML editing, I rather suspect there would never have been series-of-single-quotes to represent italics and bold... -- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
