[Edu-sig] Another update from the field...

[Michael]

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.