[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Hyperlink convention

Fri Oct 1 00:13:00 UTC 2004

David-
> It seems to me that the syntax for templates, image thumbnails, tables,
> and mathematic formulas have already made the wikitext hard to read and
> understand for new users.

Not really. Templates hide complexity and give ordinary users the power to  
quickly make use of things like nicely formatted infoboxes without knowing  
anything about the HTML. I have to admit that I am not a big fan of our  
table syntax, however; I'm as geeky as they come and I still fall back to  
HTML every now and then. The reStructured Text syntax is much lovelier,  
albeit easy to mess up:

+------------------------+------------+----------+----------+
| Header row, column 1   | Header 2   | Header 3 | Header 4 |
| (header rows optional) |            |          |          |
+========================+============+==========+==========+
| body row 1, column 1   | column 2   | column 3 | column 4 |
+------------------------+------------+----------+----------+
| body row 2             | Cells may span columns.          |
+------------------------+------------+---------------------+
| body row 3             | Cells may  | - Table cells       |
+------------------------+ span rows. | - contain           |
| body row 4             |            | - body elements.    |
+------------------------+------------+---------------------+
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#tables

Still, I think a combination of something like this for quick tables, and  
HTML hidden in templates for complex ones would be best.

Like templates, image tags have also reduced the amount of visible HTML in  
articles - don't you remember when we cleaned out all the <div  
style="float:right"> tags? This is a good thing. Surely you're not  
suggesting there's a need for empirical proof that added complexity deters  
newbies? I hold that truth to be self-evident, but in case you don't,  
browse around a TWiki or TikiWiki site sometime.

I believe that in the long term, we must entirely eliminate HTML from all  
regular pages and limit its use exclusively to templates. For this, we  
need to make some improvements to the template syntax (default values,  
loops, conditions) so that all current HTML content can be moved there and  
used dynamically.

Things which need a clean wikitext replacement:
- &mdash;   (my suggestion: --)
- &nbsp;    (my suggestion: __)
- <br>      (my suggestion: \\)
...

> The -{en-us colors; en-gb colours}- of the U.S. flag are red, white and
> blue.

I think you won't find any supporters for that scheme ;-). Even though we  
have ugliness in some articles, our sentences are at least readable. The  
current situation with regard to spelling is somewhat dissatisfactory to  
consistency nuts like ourselves, but aside from auto-conversion for the  
most common words (which would probably take too much performance to be  
worthwhile), I really see no good solution.

Regards,

Erik