Rowan Collins <rowan.collins(a)gmail.com> writes:
WP's markup - or rather MediaWiki's - is a
variant of the original
WikiWikiWeb's, and was designed with ease of editting (by humans) at
the very top of the agenda.
As Perl ;)
As for "hackish", though, I'm not sure I
agree: the *syntax* is
perfectly good at doing what it does - which is to say, it allows
people to describe the formatting they require of a piece of text.
Yes, and that's wrong. I don't care about the formatting, I'd like to
markup contents properly. WP unfortunately wants us writers to care
about formatting for certain devices (screen and print, not for audio).
With a proper
markup language it would not be necessary to change ''' ->
'' -> " -> ''' -> « -> '' -> „ ->
" all the time; you would simply write
<obj>Nuremberg Castle</obj> and you are done. Once and for all. That's
only one example.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what that example refers to.
Within a paragraph you often want to highlight some words or
phrases. Some of these phrases are citations others are catch words.
Some of us uses "quotations marks", others '''bolding'''
and next one
goes for „German UTF-8 quotations marks“. To avoid those problems, make
use of descriptive markup (e.g. TEI XML):
<q>To be, or not to be</q>
Or for catch word, when you want to describe or list famous monument in
Nuremberg:
The <obj>Nuremberg Castle</obj> is worth a visit. Some parts of it
are from the medieval period. Some buildings are later additions.
... Main Churches are <obj>St. Sebald</obj>, <obj>St.
Lorenz</obj>
and the <obj>Lady's Chapel</obj>.
I think the key problem with semantic markup is that
in order to have
any advantage, it has to be both very rich and very standardised -
e.g. you'd need to have a way of saying "this text is the name of a
film", and people would need to know that this was "<movie>" and
not
"<film>" (or "<movietitle>" or
"<filmtitle>", or any number of other
possibilities). If you were to impose such a scheme on something like
Wikipedia, you'd just create a tremendous learning curve.
Not necessarily. Most things are obvious. And those, who do not
want to make use of it, can write as before...
In
'de' they just invented an invisible "personendaten" box...
Again, you've lost me; for what purpose did they create this "box", in
what sense is it "invisible", and how would XML/"a proper markup
language" deal with the same issue?
The so called WP markup is not enough. Many a lot symbols are already
in use ' | {} [] * # = - : ; and the leading space and empty lines.
Sure, all of them are easy to remember and combining and nesting them is
no problem. Oops, I forgot to mention that <div>, <span> and some more
are also allowed...
Here is an example for the "personendaten" box:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Felixm%C3%BCller
{{Personendaten|
NAME=Felixmüller, Conrad
|ALTERNATIVNAMEN=
|KURZBESCHREIBUNG=bedeutender [[Maler]] des [[Expressionismus]] und der [[Neue
Sachlichkeit|Neuen Sachlichkeit]]
|GEBURTSDATUM=[[21. Mai]] [[1897]]
|GEBURTSORT=[[Dresden]]
|STERBEDATUM=[[24. März]] [[1977]]
|STERBEORT=[[Berlin-Zehlendorf]]
}}
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