Wiki syntax is a line-based syntax. There is /no/ wiki
markup that
spans lines. It makes editing much simpler: if you make a mistake and
forget to close something, it gets closed off quickly. HTML is not
designed to be human-editable; wiki syntax is.
Not that that's not enough, but of course, lines (that don't continue on
the next one without a *, :, etc.) are also enclosed by (unclosed! grr)
<p> tags, and you can't put a <em> in the middle of a <p> and close
it
after the next <p> and call it good HTML.
A couple things... I guess I don't see it as being too difficult or too
complicated for users to understand that you need to enclose text you
want to place emphasis on with '''. I know that stopping at newlines
prevents an entire article from being emphasized, but it also prevents
users from having large sections of emphasized text (without putting
emphasis marks on every line). The Howto page certainly makes it look
like you have to enclose your text, and in all the pages I've edited,
I've never come across a page that leaves open emphasis marks.
Also, there are lots of line spanning constructs in wikitext. <pre>,
<nowiki>, <tr>, <td>, etc. Now, I _know_ that (with the exception of
<nowiki>) that these are HTML constructs (and not Wikitext constructs),
but to the average user, they are exactly the same. So, some things
span multiple lines, and some things don't. I think that is confusing.
I guess I'd like to clarify one thing. I don't want to sound pushy, or
"not a team player", or somebody who is just jumping in and disrupting
the good work that everybody else is doing. And you all are doing a
great job, BTW. ;)
Anyways, what I want to clarify. To me, when my mind encounters '' or
''', it thinks, "Ooo! Quotation marks that make stuff bold!". My
mind
is used to closing quotation marks, so I guess that's why it makes the
most sense for them to span multiple lines until they are closed. I'm
not sure how quotes work in a lot of other languages, but I know they're
closed in Japanese much the same way (but with different symbols than
quotation marks).
That's not to say that stopping them at the end of a line is a bad idea
- I'm sure it helps a lot to prevent new users from making a bad
mistake, seeing a messed up page, and giving up.
In the end, I'm writing a new parser for Wikipedia, not for myself. If
everybody thinks it should end at newlines, I can make it do that, and
that will be that. :)
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN