[Edu-sig] Another update from the field...
Michael
ms at cerenity.org
Mon Aug 21 02:49:42 CEST 2006
On Sunday 20 August 2006 22:39, kirby urner wrote:
...
> whereas straight XHTML/CSS liberates you
> from anybody's Wiki or whatever framework.
People write and use wikis to have *human* friendly markup. (Specifically and
most often more friendly to the person who wrote it, and people who think
like them) XML & friends are machine friendly, human readable markup.
There's a huge world of difference between the two - both in terms of human
factors and practicalities. This often boils down to the fact that many
complex (but human friendly) wiki markups are actually best parsed as context
sensitive grammars (which is why they're often so repeated-pass regex heavy).
Whereas machine friendly markup is more often (not always) single pass
parseable.
Also *often* the ability of wiki style markup to be understood in a
plain text environment is much easier for people to parse, than <span
class="machine">XML</span> style annotations. But far less parseable than a
wysiwyg engine (such as included in dojo toolkit) which already does the
parsing :-) (and spits out plain old HTML)
(It's worth remembering a design goal of XML is machine friendliness and human
readability, not the other way round - wiki markup tends to favour the human)
Michael.
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