* Sergey Chernyshev <[email protected]> [Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:23:25 -0400]: > Guys, > Why are we talking XML? Yaron's Semantic Forms survived without XML - > yes, > it's definition language is not English, but it's good enough and works > relatively good with the rest of MW syntax. > > I think using XML will not necessarily do good here as form creators > would > want the language to be close to the rest of the wiki. > > Here's the example of the form which is the mix of wikitext, HTML and > regular wiki formatting > http://www.techpresentations.org/w/index.php?title=Form:Presentation&action=edit > > It worked for me. Maybe this kind of definition can be merged with > Template > pages, but frankly SF's model works pretty well (of course, SF is also > smart > about data because of SMW, but it can be more "manual"). > Hi Sergey, To me it seems that MediaWiki is moving from pure wiki towards CMS, thus, broaden it's usage (in contrary to what's been stated in bold at meta and other sites that MediaWiki is not CMS). Semantic* extensions and Wikia to me looks like a step towards CMS. Many well-made CMS use XML because there are good XML libraries which allows various processing and transformations.
Also, I believe that XML was proposed to define names, type and description of template parameters and that's also a good idea. Maybe even implementing the whole templating in XML? But, when it comes to NS_MAIN, I like wikitext, because I am a coder and I like to edit a source. I don't like visual tools, like Dreamweaver, MS Word and so on. Probably the power users, who contribute the most at wikipedia also like wikitext? I don't know whether there was any survey. To these who types fast and knows wikitext, it allows to produce formatted articles quicker than by using the GUI. But, Wikipedia probably requires an enlargement of it's user base, so wysiwyg is also very important. To me it seems that it would be great if Wikipedia was both friendly to these who likes source wikitext and to these who would love the GUI. But, I don't know whether anyone really likes wikitext, besides me. If nobody likes it, then it will be dropped. Dmitriy _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
