> ====================
> @core devs.
> Is there a detailed description, how tw syntax parsing is done,
> somewhere out there??
> ====================

Just the code, I'm afraid.

When I first wrote TiddlyWiki the wikifier was very simple, it just
handled wiki links. Here's the prerelease version (view source and
search for the definition of the wikify function):

http://www.osmosoft.com/talkytalky/twiddlywiki.html

And here's the first version to be released, which also handled
external HTML links:

http://tiddlywiki.com/firstversion.html

Sometime before the second version was released at the end of 2004, a
chap called Isao Sonobe who was using TiddlyWiki at the Kyoto
University Theoretical Physics Group very kindly contributed changes
he had made to enrich TiddlyWiki with fuller formatting: bold,
italics, tables, etc.

At the time, TiddlyWiki still couldn't save changes, and so I still
regarded it as a bit of a demo, and not important in it's own right.
So, I folded Isao's code in pretty much untouched because it seemed to
make the demo a little more useful.

And then in April 2005 or so, we figured out how to make TiddlyWiki
handle saving itself, and GTDTiddlyWiki was released, incorporating
Isao's wikifier:

http://nathanbowers.com/gtdtw/

(Again, view source and search for the wikify() function)

At this point I slowly realised that I had a bit of a problem: Isao's
code needed refactoring to make it easier to extend and change, but
worse than that, I'd accidentally selected a wiki format that I was
stuck with. If I had known that TiddlyWiki was serious I'd have
started out with the wiki syntax that I prefer personally (for example
*bold* and /italic/).

Anyhow, over the next few months I undertook a complete rewrite of the
wikifier and formatters, to make them more extensible, and the code
more maintainable. The results are pretty much what you see today in
TiddlyWiki. I and other people like Martin Budden, have experimented
with retrofitting <P> support but have concluded that it cannot be
done in a backwards compatible manner. (But if anyone thinks otherwise
I'd love to know about it).

It's all very frustrating. I'm pretty proud of the wikifier code, but
the syntax is sometimes unfortunate.

Cheers

Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Ruston
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.tiddlywiki.com

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