Brion Vibber wrote:
Would you prefer to change the behavior? Note that
this will require some
restructuring to the parser to both be more correct and and not break things,
and will leave us with inconsistent, unparseable code in the future. (That is,
it'll be impossible to tell what the code after a template inclusion will parse
as unless the template is available.)
But if we're really, really sure, we can put some time into working on that and
accept that our syntax will never be predictable. (This has consequences for
future wysiwyg or markup-sensitive assisted editing plugins.)
Isn't it general practice with a macro-like facility like templates not
to parse until you've substituted in the preprocessing phase? That is,
{{subst:foo}}, {{foo}}, and copying and pasting in the code from
Template:foo (and substituting the parameters manually) should all
produce equivalent output. Sort of like C macros---it's madness to try
to parse C code without first running the preprocessor.
If they're to have some sort of different semantics, that's a different
paradigm of sorts---it would require no longer using templates as
macros, but as functions that return complete well-formed sub-parts of
the page. I'm not really opposed to that change (I think it could be
made to work, and as you note, it makes some future editing tools easier
to write), but it should then be made obvious and well-understood that
templates aren't macros.
-Mark