(Continuing the crunching. huh? But this message is only 4 pages long.) Forked into the new thread. I'm afraid latest maillist messages were considered TLDR by most of the subscribers so I will put this in the beginning: is there any point in continuing our discussion on the subject? Platonides is a constructive company but he seems to be the only one participating. Is the community truly interested in reworking the markup? I have some knowledge and code assets that I will be happy to contribute; I will gladly take part in discussions or help improve the situation in some other way. But if Wikimedia team has different views onto the markup evolution it's fruitless to spend so much time chatting before the closed doors. My reply follows. On 08.02.2012 2:27, Platonides wrote: You mean that nobody has actually studied markup usability? True, that's why I propose only two modes: block and inline, both with clear distinctions and features. Yes, added a few simple rules an unambiguous language can be created. I'm sure most of those business e-mails and official documents can be processed by the machine without much effort. And we're talking about even more formalized language here - text markup. If that is supposed to be a long caption (4 words and a comma) then just use quotes - like in natural handwriting. {{About "Bijection, injection and surjection"}} I disagree, it only means that this subject has not yet been researched enough. Uh, I have mistyped "comma" instead of "colon". Let me correct this: 1. {{About Something}} 2. {{About Something, of kind}} 3. {{About "Something, something and something", of kind}} 4. {{About "Something, something and something", "of kind, kind and kind"}} As you can see, no character is banned from the title while in current pipe-centric approach I don't thing it's possible to have pipes there without a headache. Right, and pipes should not appear in templates either. It's too special symbol. I do not see your point. The processing is straightforward: 1. Link contains == - it separates address from title. 2. Link contains no == but contains a space - the first space separates address from title. 3. There is neither == nor ' ' - link is titleless. This means that: * local links get titles from page name, not page address (this is important and differs from current MediaWiki implementation in a better way) * remote links can also get their title from <title> after fetching first 4 KiB of that page or something Use cases: * "[[http://google/search?q=%61%62%63 Google it]]" - for external links == delimiter won't be used at all * "See this [[page]]" - current wikitext is the same * "See [[page that page]]" vs. current [[page|that page]]. Looks more clean and easier to type (space is present on all keyboards and is quite large in size). This covers not less than half local links. * "See [[Some page==this page]]" vs. current [[Some page|this page]]. This case has less drastic differences than previous 3 but a pipe is still both special to English layouts and less noticeable to human eye than double equality sign. Does "KISS" mean that every use case should be created with uniform but because of this equally inconvenient syntax? I agree that more complex cases should have correspondingly more complex syntax but this scaling must be adequate. By placing pipe everywhere not only cross-language usability is reduced but the fact that it's redundant in some cases (#1 and #3 items above) is ignored. Your example contains no double equality symbol and is treated as space-separated title: [[2| + 2 = 5]] in current wikitext. No, headings are consistent because the first heading starts with double equality sign. Give some examples and we will examine their adequateness. No, no, no, you have got a completely wrong idea. You don't have to escape SINGLE = because it is not special. You only need to escape double ==. How much double == have you seen in the links? I have seen them being used on my local bookstore site but it's surely an exception. Great, let's make machine's life easier. For such things templates must be created that will reduce the number of entities identical to all of their use cases to minimum. In MediaWiki this is done using {{templates and=parameters}} and this is good. If you were talking about copy-pasting these templates, their parameters and empty values - this is fine. But if it was about copy-pasting the same code with all rendering tricks (&nbsp;, {{iejrhgy}} and other cryptic things) - this is bad. Standardizing is fine unless it starts looking unnatural. The following example might be argued but I can't think of another one quickly: tar -czf file.tar.gz . While this uses standard CLI syntax is in true *nix ideology this is what (among other things) separate POSIX from Windows. For instance, I could write: tar file.tar.gz . ...and the program will detect -czf arguments on its own based on -f is simply implied because there are 2 unnamed arguments (without leading -X) -c target file doesn't exist -z target file has extension .gz It's the same with templates or other markup: while {{About page=Earth kind=planet}} or something similar is fine, {{About Earth, planet}} or some other form is more appropriate in this particular use case. Yes, this is one of the ways and I would opt for it if we want to have a strict syntax. Can you elaborate more on this point? Indeed, HTML is cumbersome, that's why wikitext and all other text markups have been invented. But they don't have to copy HTML syntax - just the opposite. Clean syntax for whom? For Englishmen? And are hashes actually clean? If so, why don't we use them in our e-mail messages? Not at all because we are talking about context-specific grammar. Addresses in links can hold no formatting and thus all but context ending tokens (]], space and ==) are ignored there. And yes, context-specific grammar is more than regular expressions can handle. Regexps are good but this doesn't mean anything incompatible with sed is beyond "too complex". As already mentioned, I am using my own markup processor written in PHP on my projects and it implements all markup already described including the [[http://italic]] (context-specific grammar) case. And its parsing loop is under 350 lines of code. Thank you. I have given it a lot of thinking and practice but I'm sure there still are things to improve. I would be ecstatic if my experience can help the world's largest free knowledge community. Thanks again for your mail, Platonides. Signed, P. Tkachenko