On 2017-04-10 06:17, Denny Vrandečić wrote:
On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 11:30 PM James Hare <jamesmh...@gmail.com> wrote:
Why, exactly, do you want a wikitext intermediary between your JSON and
your HTML? The value of wikitext is that it’s a syntax that is easier to
edit than HTML. But if it’s not the native format of your data, nor can
browsers render it directly, what’s the point of having it?
Ah, good question indeed. The reason is that users would be actually
putting fragments of wikitext into the JSON structure, and then the JSON
structure gets assembled into wikitext. Not only would I prefer to have the
users work with fragments of wikitext than fragments of HTML, but some
things are almost impossible with HTML - e.g. making internal links red or
blue depending on the existence of the article, etc.
It would be more reliable to parse each fragment of wikitext separately,
and then build the HTML out of them. If you try to make a big chunk of
wikitext with user-supplied fragments, you'll soon run into two problems:
* Users will accidentally put '<nowiki>' or something into one of the
fields and completely mess up the rendering.
* Users will intentionally put '[[Foo|' in one field and ']]' into
another and then be mad at you when you change the structure in a minor
way and their link no longer works.
--
Bartosz Dziewoński
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