tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33573016.post8659409324473832029..comments2024-02-11T02:24:22.330-06:00Comments on Nonbovine Ruminations: More on my MediaWiki portAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04107127399494404366noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33573016.post-40121523297036338582007-12-04T21:19:00.000-06:002007-12-04T21:19:00.000-06:00Hey I heard my name mentioned*. Yeah, I'm doing a ...Hey I heard my name mentioned*. Yeah, I'm doing a grammar in ANTLR, which coincidentally is producing a parser in Java. So in a sense I'm also producing a Java port of MediaWiki, though my focus is more on understanding and documenting the language.<BR/><BR/>The biggest problems are really:<BR/><BR/>1) ANTLR 3 is flaky and poorly documented. I hope it improves, or a lot of this effort is going to be wasted by switching to something else.<BR/>2) The wikitext language is poorly defined, and there is little separation of "the parser renders input X as Y" and "X is an error which the parser happens to render as Y". Endless debate required...<BR/>3) The wikitext language is hard to parse. Coming up with sensible tokens is a serious pain in the arse.<BR/><BR/>Steve<BR/>*Seriously. I was self-googling.Stevehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11963716974666842075noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33573016.post-14413579961819169122007-11-26T11:20:00.000-06:002007-11-26T11:20:00.000-06:00Relevant to this old post: serious work is now pro...Relevant to this old post: serious work is now proceeding on writing a reimplementable syntax for MediaWiki. See the new wikitext-l mailing list. Steve Bennett is doing the heavy lifting in ANTLR (rather than attempting it with EBNF). See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec . The hard part appears to be distinguishing quirks that are mere artifacts of the current parser from quirks that are linguistically important in languages other than English.David Gerardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13057086390864018760noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33573016.post-47046579541376021982007-09-27T15:14:00.000-05:002007-09-27T15:14:00.000-05:00I'm not adverse to talking about ideas, although t...I'm not adverse to talking about ideas, although this project will probably take me quite a while yet. (I've been working on it, on and off, for nearly a year, mind you.)<BR/><BR/>I also fixed the link, my bad.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04107127399494404366noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33573016.post-6403656255254481402007-09-27T13:46:00.000-05:002007-09-27T13:46:00.000-05:00Wow, cool. (Your myrtle link doesn't work, by the...Wow, cool. (Your myrtle link doesn't work, by the way.)<BR/><BR/>When you're done with this, do you want to talk about other possible projects? I have a million ideas, but a severe dearth of programming talent. (Though there was that one time I wrote a terrible wikisyntax parser in ruby and applescript ...) For starters, there are a lot of brilliant client-side animation tools -- apple's Core Animation comes to mind - that could make an utterly kick-ass wikipedia client possible.Ben Yateshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11551938089613651798noreply@blogger.com