An interesting idea just popped into my head, as a combination of my
explorations through the dom preprocessor and my attempt at deferring
editsection replacement till after parsing is done so that skins can
modify the markup used in an editsection link in a skin-specific way
without breaking things, and so that we can stop fragmenting the parser
cache by user language just for edit section links.
A postprocessor. It would be quite interesting if instead of html we
started outputting something like this in our parser output:
<root><html><p>foo</p><h2></html><editsection
page="Foo"
section="1">bar</editsection><html>bar</h2><p>baz</p><h2></html><choose><option><html><p>foo</p></html></option><option><html><p>bar</p></html></option><option><html><p>baz</p></html></option></choose></root>
((don't get scarred off by all the entities, this is nothing new, try
looking at a preprocess-xml cache entry))
Course this is a Postprocessor_DOM oriented look, like Preprocessor_Hash
we'd have a Postprocessor_Hash and it would store a different format
like we already do with Preprocessor_Hash (serialized?).
The idea being the creation of new markers that aren't 100% parsed but
are outputted in a easy to deserialize format and finish parsing with
minimal work and extensions can output and have a postprocessor hook
expand later on. In essence the idea here is two fold.
Firstly things like the <editsection page="Foo"
section="1">bar</editsection> I tried to introduce now is no longer a
hack. And we can try to start deferring minimal processing cost things
which fragment the parser cache if they aren't needed. Ideally in the
future if something like {{int:asdf}} isn't used in a [[]] or in a
parser function and is just a base level bit of display isolated from
the rest of the WikiText we might be able to output it in a way that we
don't have to fragment the cache by user lang but can still output the
message in the user's lang by deferring it.
And as a big extra bonus, think of the RandomSelection extension. Right
now extensions like RandomSelection end up disabling the entire parser
cache for a page, just so they can output a random one of a series of
options. With a postprocessor they could instead craft partially parsed
output where all the normal wikitext is still parsed, but all the
options given in the source text are outputted and the postprocessor
handles the actual random selection on each page view, only outputting
one of the three html nodes.
Likewise we might be able to implement "Welcome {{USERNAME}}!" without
fragmenting the cache by user or having to disable it.
The key being that we get things as variable as complete randomness, at
the level of re-executing that randomness on each page view, yet have
barely any more processing to do than we did before. (like the rest of
the ui that isn't part of the page content)
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
