On 09/11/2007, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/9/07, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So, I would imagine implementing a new parser that has the same
behaviour as the current one will require enormous amounts of
Why on earth would we want to do that?
Backwards compatibility. The main suggestion I've seen is rewriting
the parser in such a way as to make it behave like the old one in
everything except a few unavoidable corner cases (bold italics is not
a corner case). If we're going to make significant changes to the way
wikitext is rendered, then we don't want to start with writing a
grammar for the existing parser - we should start with writing a
grammar for how we'd like the parser to be, and forget about the
existing parser completely. That would, however, break a large number
of existing pages on a large number of websites and would quite likely
result in us all being lynched. Depending on what changes we make, we
might be able to implement automated conversion to the new syntax, but
people still aren't going to like it.