[WikiEN-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

Wed Jun 7 21:27:47 UTC 2006

Brion Vibber wrote:
> Would you prefer to change the behavior? Note that this will require some
> restructuring to the parser to both be more correct and and not break things,
> and will leave us with inconsistent, unparseable code in the future. (That is,
> it'll be impossible to tell what the code after a template inclusion will parse
> as unless the template is available.)
>
> But if we're really, really sure, we can put some time into working on that and
> accept that our syntax will never be predictable. (This has consequences for
> future wysiwyg or markup-sensitive assisted editing plugins.)
>   

Isn't it general practice with a macro-like facility like templates not 
to parse until you've substituted in the preprocessing phase?  That is, 
{{subst:foo}}, {{foo}}, and copying and pasting in the code from 
Template:foo (and substituting the parameters manually) should all 
produce equivalent output.  Sort of like C macros---it's madness to try 
to parse C code without first running the preprocessor.

If they're to have some sort of different semantics, that's a different 
paradigm of sorts---it would require no longer using templates as 
macros, but as functions that return complete well-formed sub-parts of 
the page.  I'm not really opposed to that change (I think it could be 
made to work, and as you note, it makes some future editing tools easier 
to write), but it should then be made obvious and well-understood that 
templates aren't macros.

-Mark