Too much icons below the post…

Your icons made me search…

I find http://sharethis.com/

and later: http://groups.google.com/group/open-share-icon-project/

and that led me to: http://languageicons.omcomc.com/index.html

Ahh the internet!

:)

Geoff

@Chriswaterguy: GFDL 1.3 is due out really soon, dunno if that’ll include CC-by-sa compatibility as yet.

I think the real win will be in third-party parsers of provable 100% accuracy. PHP in the default install, compiled C on a heavy-duty site or for intensive post-processing.

Tim has said we don’t necessarily have to preserve every stupid corner case and piece of emergent behaviour … unless they’re used by people and considered part of wikitext. This is a soft boundary.

As to parsing: converting regular expressions to EBNF is relatively trivial, in might not even be needed, depending on what framework you use to build the parser. The problem is that mediawiki syntax is not regular [2], and very likely not LL-1 or LR-1 [1] either. I’m not even convinced that it’s even context-free in all cases [4] (parsing non-CF grammar is very hard, even theoretically). It also has an annyoing tendency to depend on localization and customization: a promintent example are image links. They follow a different grammar than normal links, but can only be detected when knowing all local names of the image namespace. Another problems are templates that are “syntactically incomplete”: you can not parse the template code individually, and then use the result. You need a separate preprocessor pass (using a limited grammar) to resolve them (which requires database access). Same goes for some parser functions. This makes it very hard to detach the parser from the rest of the system.

For the parser tests: the are badly named, really — what they test is code generation, not parsing as such. What we currently have is a “munger” that mogrifies the wikitext until it resembles html — a real parser would not generate html. It would generate a parse tree (or parse events), and a code generator would be plugged into that. For a wysiwyg engine, it might not generate html code at all, but a DOM tree or something like that. And for exporting, mit might generate something else, like TeX (that would rock).

The advantage of having a formal grammar would be to allow people to build parsers on different platforms — for php to be used in MediaWiki itself, in javascript for a web based wysiwym-editor, in python for use with bots, etc.

My point is: it’s not just a lot of work someone needs to do. There are conceptual problems with this. On of the biggest is that due to the reliance on configuration, localization, database content and extension-defined syntax, a formal grammar in the academic sense (EBNF or a production grammar [5]) is not even possible.

To me this means that we can not hope for a simple or clean solution. We can only try to build something that is better than what we have, and live with the quirks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cacycle/wikEd
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_grammar
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LL_parser resp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LR_parser
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_free_grammar
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_%28computer_science%29

*waves to barb, roger and tilman(three names I remember from the ng)

Dave, you just missed Hubbard, whose 21 year break was up. Please report to the implant station early, we need you back!

Requiescat in Pace, Dave.

roger

He was the first critics I ever met. Quite mad of course. I can’t call him Eccentric because that term is reserved for the wealthy.

As you can tell from the photos, he cut an *ahem* imposing figure. I remember my first TCR picket. I had arrived way too early and so had he. So for about 20 minutes we picketed alone. If it had been anyone else I would probably have waited for the rest of the gang, but not Dave. He was happily marching up and down bellowing into his megaphone and putting the fear of gosh into unsuspecting passers by. So I felt compelled to join him if only to assure people they weren’t being attacked. It was a very uncomfortable 20 minutes.

That was Dave. Striding out where others would timidly tip-toe, brandishing that toilet seat and to hell with what anyone else thought. No-one was better suited to be glorious leader of the ARSCC(wdne) UK Chapter.

Thanks Dave. Thanks for bringing a little levity and lunacy to our merry band of SPs. Don’t forget you signed a gazillion year contract with the ARSCC(wdne) and when you pick out your next body, try to make sure it works a little better, ok?

Lance.