RE: [Phpwiki-talk] Re: Wiki RFC Discussion

[electron <ele...@mg...>]

electron schrieb:
> This seems fine by me, a standard could benefit everyone well. Below =
are
my
> thoughts:

Standard for whom? There is no common wiki standard yet. If people will=20
decide on a standard one could switch from engine to engine, and only=20
the wiki's with the best features will survive. That's far too liberal=20
for me. Most new engines nowadays only survive because of their "weird"=20
new syntax and their usebase hooked to that, and not because of their=20
features. I don't like concentration that much.

---

Before we get too far off base, are you for or against the RFC? I'm =
going to
guess we are both on the same page as for it, if not what should it be?


---

> PhpWiki uses 3 different methods for database dumps. Ugly. Hopefully =
the
> goal will be a dump from phpwiki could be imported with ease to =
another
> wiki.

Not ugly. We have to support the old schema's also.
The new MIME-ified syntax is the easiest, best and most general for us.

XML is pure hype with no substance and generally overkill for such=20
simple data as wiki formated text, which is just plaintext like =3Dpod=20
with headers.
We have no loops, and almost no recursive structures in wikitext.
Only our new blockformatter is moderately recursive, but other wikis are =

not that clever, so it's generally not mapable.

---
Ugly I say, in jest. When I first picked up PhpWiki I thought the MIME
solution was very creative.=20

I'm not an XML fan, I'm a standards fan. Implementing XML is a pain and
overkill and a bunch of swearing. The point and strength on XML is it is =
a
way to export data that non-similar databases can read. If you don't do =
a
good job implementing HTML, the browser can compensate. If you don't do =
a
good job in XML, the parser kicks out a strict error. XML just makes =
sure
everyone is on the same page and doesn't have to deal with
silly-implementation-things(TM). Like the crap we have to go through for
pear/adodb.

---


Personally I prefer to do the translation on purpose in one of my=20
favorite languages (lisp or perl or php) with a couple of lines, such as =

MoinMoin =3D> PhpWiki, but if someone ever will come up with a unified=20
wiki schema, we might have to think of supporting this new out- and=20
input format also. Hopefully its no XML.
This RFC format for example looks fine for such an intermediate format,=20
because it's easy to read and easy to write. As any Wiki syntax, in=20
contrast to XML as we all know.
That's the whole reason why we use wiki or pod, and not HTML or troff.

> I intend to write a schema if none exists but not for a month or two.
> Requires digging into more than one of my XML books. :)

Please do so :)  I'd like to see such a thing in existance.

---

The XML schema is only for exporting/storage, not meant to be seen by =
the
end user or even what we store in our databases. (Unless one is really =
nuts
and has a ton of drive space.) Only to be included for engine =
portability.

And on a final note:

Nonprogrammers <3 wiki.

Programmers who know what $_ is <3 wiki too.

-Jtp