Apologies if this has been brought up before, but I am
curious about the status of automatic replacement of
dashes in the wikitext (in particular -- and ---) with
HTML-entity versions that many users seem to like so
much (ndash and mdash). I noticed that a while back
(February 2004) such a conversion was implemented, but
apparently reverted due to undesirable breakage. Any
way it could be reinstated? I may look into it once I
get familiar with the code.
Also, there's some ongoing disagreement about
"correct" quote usage: several users like to replace
standard ASCII apostrophes with their lsquo/rsquo HTML
counterparts, which seriously uglifies the wikitext.
The same is true of normal double-quotes
(ldquo/rdquo). I realize it may be quite difficult to
implement some form of quote-matching that could
automatically convert these from ASCII, especially
given our other uses for single-quotes; would it be
feasible to use multiple ASCII double-quotes to clue
in the parser about desired behavior? e.g., "foo" for
normal ASCII double-quotes, ""foo"" for an HTML
lsquo/rsquo, and """foo""" for ldquo/rdquo. I can see
where this might run into some problems in situations
involving nested quotation, but seems adequate for the
majority of quoting.
Given the regularity of conflict over this issue (not
to mention some users, who shall remain nameless, on a
mission to replace all occurrences of what they
perceive as bad quoting, wikitext readability be
damned), it seems like something worth implementing. I
like correct and nicely-readable HTML-entity-style
quotes as much as the next guy, as long as it doesn't
hamper editing. It's frustrating to see so much heated
debate over a matter that could, at least in theory,
be solved by such an improvement.
Eric
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