Re: WikiHaddock

Hi, I am quite strongly opposed to using MW markup in my Haskell files. The reasons is that it is not well thought-out, it is not well defined, and it looks ugly, especially when viewed with a monospaced font (all the quotes!). While the last one is clearly subjective, the others are based on an attempt to write a MW parser, which was not a pleasant experience. -Iavor On 1/10/07, Conal Elliott wrote:

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 wrote:

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On Tue, 2007-01-09 at 21:58 -0800, Conal Elliott wrote:

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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

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