[Pmwiki-users] Whitepaper about markup strategy

[Jonathan Scott Duff]

On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 02:19:34PM +0200, Bernhard Weichel in pmwiki-users wrote:
> being somewhat unhappy with PmWiki markup, I started to write a whitepaper
> about this.
> 
> http://www.b-weichel.2in.de/weichel/pmwiki.php/WhitePapers/MarkupStrategy
> 
> I would like to hear comments here or even added comments into the document.

This is all very interesting, but what problem does it solve?

Quoting your white paper:

> Requirements from the Implementor's perspective
>
>       * It must be easy to parse
>       * It should be possible to do a line by line processing
>       * If status changes are necessary, there must be a transparent
>         state change model
>       * simple conversion principles
>       * It shall be easy to convert to well formed XML in order to do
>         advanced processing It must be technically easy to separate
>         markup from contents

Why these implementation requirements?  Wikis are meant to be
"processed" by humans.  Computer processing is secondary.  So "easy to
parse" is an author requirement first and if that makes the
implementor's job a little tougher, then that's okay; he only has to
implement the thing once, the authors spend *MUCH* more time
reading/writing the markup. 

So, why should it be "easy to convert to XML" instead of "possible to
convert to XML" and "technically easy to separate markup from
contents" instead of "technically possible to separate markup from
contents"? Why must the conversion principles be simple?

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at cbi.tamucc.edu