I wonder how we could get the full expressiveness of Mediawiki (MW) markup
out the back end, when haddock parses the input according to a less
expressive markup language. Hm. Maybe just let it pass lots of markup
through without realizing that it's markup. Then a MW back end would
unparse a few things (italics, hyperlinks) back into markup. Of course, MW
markup differs from Haddock markup, so we'd probably want to turn off some
of Haddock's parsing (italics, at least). I don't see how to do that in a
non-intrusive way.
Perhaps Haddock could be refactored and exposed as a library, to give it
some more flexibility. Some refactoring is intended anyway, to sync up with
ghc language changes. In the process, its core functionality could be
extracted as a library and hooked up to various front-ends as well as
back-ends and maybe other processing as well.
Cheers, - Conal
On 1/10/07, Duncan Coutts
On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 21:58 -0800, Conal Elliott wrote:
Suppose Haddock's documentation language ("-- | ...") were an extended form of a common wiki markup language, and specifically Wikimedia's, because the Haskell wiki uses it. Instead of converting to HTML, Haddock could then pass through most markup unchanged and make wiki links out of its current link markup (modules & entities).
Haddock is designed to be able to produce various different output formats. It'd be perfectly reasonable to add a wkik markup backend. There's nothing that special about the html backend, it's just the most mature and most used.
Duncan