I second this suggestion!
On 14/11/2007, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 13/11/2007, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
Why is the parser outputting something other than
what the user
wants ever desirable?
You're talking about some very different things when you use the
word "user" here. The current parser (PHP regexp) is used both
when an editor saves an article and when a reader browses an
article (unless it was still in the cache). Producing an error
message for a reader isn't meaningful. Some editors only fix a
single spelling error and are not interested in learning about
syntax errors in other parts of the article. Any kind of error
message must be opt-in, that is what "lint" was to old C
programmers, or what "-Wall -pedantic" (activate all warning
messages) is to the GCC compiler. This could be useful, though,
which suggests the parser should be able to run in different
modes: Just-show-it mode and lint mode.
How about always allowing saves (I think most people are agreed that
refusing to save invalid syntax is a bad idea), but showing error
messages when the page is displayed immediately after saving (I've
thinking ?action=debug, this would allow people to get the error
messages manually at other times as well, and shouldn't be too hard to
implement). Normal readers of the page would just see the parser's
best guess, but when someone clicks "save" they would see it with
inline error messages (appending them just makes it impossible to tell
where the error is - articles don't have line numbers), probably with
a big red warning at the top to make sure people don't just move on
without looking at the article they've just saved.
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