On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 01:18:27PM -0500, Jim R. Wilson wrote: > > 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 appraisal of Steve's work, as I watched it here, is that that's not actually true this time. Steve has gotten a lot closer than anyone else whose work I'd looked at -- it's actually functional right now for probably better than 75% of the mediawiki-alike uses you might want to put it to, I think, based on how he was describing it. And more importantly, he picked a base that makes it easier to extend the work he already did. > 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. Yeah, but that wasn't in fact the raeson, I don't think. My view of the two goals was: 1) create a replacement parser that will drop-in and actually be maintainable and understandable. 2) create a framework for parsers that will work with MW-compatible text, and which can be used for other things. I, for example, want to be able to drop an MW compatible parser into WebGUI, so content people can completely avoid HTML. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink [EMAIL PROTECTED] Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274 Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. -- (Josef Stalin) _______________________________________________ Wikitext-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l
