On Dienstag, 13. Januar 2009, Yaron Koren wrote: > On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 5:25 AM, Markus Krötzsch < > > [email protected]> wrote: > > I do not want to contribute to the general > > interface discussion here, > > Well, I'd like to hear your opinion on the issue, if possible - yours is > obviously the most relevant one.
I don't really think so. I must say that I don't care much about syntax. But
since you are asking I can explain some technical considerations that I have
when thinking about new input methods:
* Parsing [[ ]] is not easy and requires us to look through the wiki-text
string for matching patterns. This causes some issues since the PHP library we
use crashes on large matches. This is why nested annotations and links were
disabled. In contrast, parsing {{ }} is done by MediaWiki for us, and nesting
annotations is not a (technical) problem there.
* Parsing [[ ]] is not clean since it happens at a stage during parsing where
MediaWiki has half-processed the input. This makes the whole thing somewhat
messy and undefined. Parsing {{ }} is clearly preferred there, since {{ }}
have a clear place in the DOM of MediaWiki.
* Parsing annotations requires database lookups, e.g. to get the type of some
property. Technically, it would be desirable to collect many database calls
into one (or at least into few). This might be easier with inputs like #set or
true semantic templates where many inputs are collected within one parser
function. Annotations spread all over the page would require multiple runs to
first gather, then jointly parse, and finally output all annotations.
In addition, I think that it is nice if users can see the output SMW gives
after processing some annotation value (as opposed to #set). For example, this
could include tooltips, hyperlinks, or warning messages. Some datatypes such
as Code also provide more complex formating for data, which is rather useful
to have.
Summing up those four points, and adding my further experience that most SMW
sites will want to use SemanticForms, I arrive at the following conclusion:
SMW's primary input mechanism should be an extended form of the current
semantic templates (#declare). Annotations would be declared (this works
already) on template pages, so that some parameters get annotated
automatically without the need of [[ ]] syntax in the template code. Pages
then simply use the template, provide parameters as usual, and some of the
latter are turned into annotations and displayed accordingly (this is what
does not work yet; #declare does not display any SMW output, not even errors).
To do this, someone needs to extend #declare (and the associated processing)
so that annotated parameters are replaced by the texts that SMW returns when
processing the values (including error messages and the like). Like the
current [[ ]] thing, this approach is still universal in the sense that every
wiki could be modified to use only those "semantic templates" and still would
look and work exactly the same way. Yet, no more [[ ]] parsing would be needed
(of course we would keep this as an optional input for backwards
compatibility).
-- Markus
P.S. I also think that a syntax with {{ }} is more likely to be compatible
with existing and future WYSIWYG extensions, all of which will probably
support template invocation, but most of which will misread [[ :: ]] pieces.
>
> -Yaron
--
Markus Krötzsch
Semantic MediaWiki http://semantic-mediawiki.org
http://korrekt.org [email protected]
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