[Wikipedia-l] Re: Extension syntax vote begins

Fri Apr 9 02:07:22 UTC 2004

On Apr 7, 2004, at 7:57 PM, Timwi wrote:

> David Friedland wrote:
>
>> Timwi wrote:
>>> There is no other way I can imagine that people seriously prefer 
>>> <math>x^2</math> over simple-and-quick [!x^2!] or [$x^2$] or 
>>> whatever. Except for <rend type="math">, *all* proposed syntaxes are 
>>> better than <math>.
>> The reason that non-savvy users might prefer <math>x^2</math> is that 
>> it requires understanding the concept of markup, a concept which most 
>> people learn in the context of HTML, and the very first thing you 
>> learn when you attempt to learn HTML is that things are enclosed in 
>> things that look like <something> </something>.
>
> Which is also why we use <b>...</b> instead of ''', <a> instead of 
> [[...]], <li> instead of *, etc.?

Think about it: '' and ''' make a lot of sense visually.  Same goes for 
[[...]],
at least more sense than <a href=...>.  Why <a>!? (*I* know why, but 
many people
don't.)  And it's *really* obvious that * and # are easy to interpret.

These symbols make the syntax *more* human-readable.  For extensions it 
starts
to get muckier and, after all, less common.

Myself, I'd like to have the XML-like tags for inline content and 
something more
{{msg:xyz}}-like for transclusion.  That, to me, is the most readable 
solution.

Peter

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