On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Erik Rose <[email protected]> wrote:
>> This is one of the most important and hotly debated questions abotu the new
>> parser design: should it allow syntactically incomplete templates, or not?
>
> Yes, it's got all sorts of wonderful technical advantages: a DB-less 
> translation from markup to DOM is nothing to be sneered at. Though I can 
> throw out this cautionary tale: our old MW parser implementation didn't allow 
> these "partial" templates, and our writers have spent maybe a dozen hours 
> fruitlessly trying various crazy ways to factor up collections of common 
> bullet points for use in lists of instructions.

There is the tempting but unclean (unclean!!) option of disallowing
partial templates, then cleaning up certain constructs afterwards. A
series of <ul></ul> nodes can be merged into one in DOM or text/regexp
etc.

That would allow for mostly hack-less templates and clean parsing, at
the price of bespoke markup magick fixes in the end. Just sayin'...

Magnus

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