Don't worry Mingli, > My concern is that the mediawiki dev team should have some plan whatever the > parser will parse one time or many times.
It is almost certainly impossible to parse wikitext "one time" - it's too beautifully complex for that. > Someone should push things to progress gradually. In another 8 to 10 months, someone will try again, there will be a big flareup of activity regarding a standardized, formalized, perfectly context-free mediawiki grammar and subsequent language-agnostic parser. At the end of that struggle and strife, we'll be back here where we started. I'm not being cynical here (nor am I trying to prematurely instigate another flamewar) - it's just the nature of the problem. A lot of really bright minds have attempted to fit wikitext into a traditional grammar mold. The problem is that it's not a traditional grammar. My recommendation is to address the actual reason why someone might want a context-free grammar in the first place. Considering how much time and creative energy has been spent on trying to create the one-true-parser, I wonder whether it would be easier to simply port the existing Parser to other languages directly (regular expressions and all). I bet it would be. -- Jim R. Wilson (jimbojw) On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 9:10 AM, mingli yuan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thansk, Tomaž and David. > > My concern is that the mediawiki dev team should have some plan whatever the > parser will parse one time or many times. > Someone should push things to progress gradually. > > Wikimedia projects have been accumulated so huge a repository of knowledge. > And these knowledge should be used in a wider circumstances. Could you > imagine that wikipedia articles was always bounded with a php regexp parser? > Then any formal description of the wikitext is welcomed. We should free the > knowledge from its format. > > Thanks again. > > Regards, > Mingli > > On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 9:01 PM, David Gerard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> 2008/7/14 Tomaž Šolc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> >> > - From my observations I believe that the only possible way that any >> > formal grammar will replace the current PHP parser is if the MediaWiki >> > team is prepared to change the current philosophy of desperately trying >> > to make sense of any kind of broken string of characters the user >> > provides i.e. if MediaWiki could throw up a syntax error on invalid >> > input and/or they significantly reduce the number of valid constructs >> > (all horrible combinations of bold/italics markup come to mind) >> > Given my understanding of the project I find this extremely unlikely. >> > But then I'm not a MediaWiki developer, so I might be completely wrong >> > here. >> >> >> I suspect it's highly unlikely that we'll ever have a situation where >> any wikitext will come up with "SYNTAX ERROR" or equivalent. (Some >> templates on en:wp do something like this for bad parameters, but they >> try to make the problem reasonably obvious to fix.) Basically, the >> stuff's gotta work for someone who can't work a computer or think in >> terms of this actually being a computer language rather than text with >> markup. I would *guess* that an acceptable failure mode would be just >> to render the text unprocessed. >> >> The thing to do with particularly problematic "bad" constructs would >> be to go through the wikitext corpus and see how often they're >> actually used and how fixable they are. >> >> Remember also third-party users of MediaWiki, who may expect a given >> bug effect to work as a feature. >> >> >> - d. >> >> >> >> - d. >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikitext-l mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitext-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l > > _______________________________________________ Wikitext-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l
