The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
dirkriehle.com
The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
#2I hadn't realized that there were any parsing issues around MediaWiki's markup. 5000 lines of PHP? Eek.
Re: The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
#3link died. any mirrors?
Re: The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
#4Site down, here is a mirror: https://www.readability.com/articles/r9i55x6e
cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8xjwEj-...
Re: The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
#5link died. any mirrors?
Re: The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
#6link died. any mirrors?
[deleted]
Re: The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
#7Site down, here is a mirror: https://www.readability.com/articles/r9i55x6e cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8xjwEj-...
Your readability link redirects me to readabilities home page.
Re: The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
#8AST of an example page is the interesting bit:
Re: The Parser that Cracked the MediaWiki Code
#9I hadn't realized that there were any parsing issues around MediaWiki's markup. 5000 lines of PHP? Eek.
It's worse. The MediaWiki PHP code doesn't implement a proper scanner and parser, it's a bunch of regexes around which the code has grown more or less organically. Silent compensation for mismatched starting and ending tokens abounds, and causes problems for all consumers of the markup, in the same way that lenient HTML parsers have. The difference is that Wikipedia, as the sole channel for editing markup, could have easily rejected syntax errors with helpful messages instead of silently compensating.
If it was anything else, I'd say "who cares," but this is "the world's knowledge" -- we absolutely should care about the format it's stored in. I'm glad to see people tackling this problem.