Re: [Yaml-core] A Wiki that uses YAML syntax?

[Brian I. <in...@tt...>]

On 30/05/03 08:58 -0700, Nathan Sharfi wrote:
> On 5/30/03 1:38 AM, "Sophie Italy" <its...@ho...> wrote:
> 
> > Yaml would be a wonderful syntax base for Wikis.
> 
> I, uh...respectfully disagree.
> 
> > * Type in logical structure of your text, including sequences, maps, etc
> 
> Not all of the text I write is logically structured. Wiki posts even less
> so.
> 
> > * Get immediate structured representation of the entry in your Wiki scripts
> 
> How would this be useful?
> 
> > * Use some stylesheet-like mechanism which transforms these predefined YAML
> > tags to HTML markup
> 
> Bear in mind that YAML will only be able to handle block-level elements at
> best--<p>, <blockquote> (maybe, with a hack or two), <div>, <ul>, <ol>,
> <dl>, <dt>, <dd>, and <li>. How will you handle, say, <strong>, <em>, <dfn>,
> <kbd>, and <span>?

Another problem with using YAML is that YAML parsers are designed to
fail on invalid input. Wiki translators must always complete, even if
they produce garbage.

It would be frustrating for a person to be searching for a YAML glitch
in order to get back a visual page.

> > * Throw in some YAML tags that are purely formatting, for those who want to
> > directly input markup
> 
> YAML doesn't seem to have tags. Could you post an example of something ?
> 
> > * If Yaml would allow named types (perhaps a distinguished Yaml tag would
> > suffice to fake it) then you can have customizable stylesheet mappings
> 
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Again, could you please supply a
> basic example?
> 
> ---
> 
> Quite honestly, I'm not sure the world needs another semi-structured
> text->HTML processor. Textile and reStructuredText seem quite adequate (even
> if I personally think that both--especially the latter--are impediments to,
> not facilitators of communication.)
> 
> One of the core problems with this idea is that YAML is, IMO, a fairly poor
> markup language and you'll inevitably be dependent on some *other* markup
> language to produce elements in-line with text.

Well the YAML Spec is written in YAML with some wiki markup added. It's
actually nice because you can extract the productions. So I think YAML
has some uses for document formatting, but it's definitely not optimized
for that.

Cheers, Brian