From: "Leonardo Boshell" <p(a)kapcoweb.com>
So, I guess what I'm trying to tell you is, is it a good idea if I work
on the old (perl) wiki software? or should I wait for the PHP wiki?..
Since the PHP wiki will very probably replace the Perl software everywhere
your work on the Perl script will be lost then.
bear in mind that I'm mostly interested in the
improvement of the
Spanish Wikipedia (although, if I can contribute to other projects in
the process, and eventually make the world a better place, I won't get
mad :)
At the moment the idea is to have eventually the same script for all
languages. So if you want to add something that is language dependent you
have to do it in a way that makes either appopriate for all languages or
easily adaptable (by, say, changing a certain include).
Personally, I have a couple of ideas I'd like to
implement on the wiki
software:
(a) A new, easier(?) way to create tables inside wiki pages. I
understand that some time ago, somebody wanted to do something like this
with vertical bars (`|'):
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/How_does_one_edit_a_page/Old+version
(near the bottom of the page)
I wouldn't implement this feature in the same way (I don't even
understand it completely!), but basically I want to create an
alternative method to include tables in the encyclopedia without HTML.
Frankly, I'm not a big fan of adding any more mark-up at the moment. The
parser is still a mess, needs optimization and we don't have an exact formal
description of how the syntax looks and what it does. Once we have those
things, we can start thinking about changing the mark-up.
Granted, this may be about just pure eye-candy stuff,
and it may piss
off many javascript haters. But please remember that (1) it could be
implemented carefully, so it doesn't break anything on any browser, and
remain standards-compliant, and (2) it could be an optional feature, so
in case your head aches every time you see a <script> tag, you could
just turn it off.
We have not been very succesful at "careful implementing" sofar. :-/ And (2)
is really not a very good argument. You have seen how many options we have
already. Also in this respect we have to keep things as simple as possible.
- A collection of buttons that allow you to insert
special symbols
easily (like a character map, right there beside your editing box)
Could be useful, but how many people who want to type Spanish don't have a
Spanish key board or have some short-cuts for Spanish letters?
- A "Preview" area, updated immediately
every time I type a character.
So you are going to write another version of the parser in Javascript? Two
versions of the parser in different languages doesn't seem very maintainable
to me.
Perhaps I sound a bit grumpy, but there is still an awfull lot of work that
needs to be done. We need a formal description of the mark-up. We need a
better parser. We need a better organization of the code and a
well-understood architecture for the internationalization. We need to get
rid of the current long list of bugs. Et cetera. What we do not need is more
and more and more features that make the script harder to maintain and bring
it closer to feature-death.
-- Jan Hidders