[WikiEN-l] Template HTML fixups coming this week

Wed Jun 7 21:38:46 UTC 2006

Delirium wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> 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 depends on the macro-like facility.

> 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.

In what way is that not like a macro?

Note that the C preprocessor is not the only macro language in existence; it's
just a particularly ugly and poorly-integrated example. In fact it's a perfect
example of how *not* to design a macro language, since it's impossible to
reliably work with C source code programatically due to it. Simple cases mostly
work, while mildly complex cases explode dramatically for no apparent reason.

Dumb source-code replacement (like the C preprocessor) is extremely difficult to
work with; however parse-tree replacement is clean and easy to work with for
analysis, conversion, and editing tools.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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