Comment by firasd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by firasd | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to think about how complex the wikipedia text is compared to something like github flavored markdown or even standard html tables (although I guess it eventually renders into standard html so it's not more complex than the latter when all other html elements are considered in addition to <table>)

For example the swatch internet time infobox is dynamically updated

{{short description|Alternate time system by watch maker Swatch}} {{Infobox | image = [[File:Swatch beat Logo.svg|200px|alt=Logo of Swatch Internet Time]] | caption = Logo of Swatch Internet Time | title = Time{{efn|at page generation }} {{purge|(update to view correct time)}} | label1 = 24-hour time (UTC) | data1 = {{nowrap|{{#time:H:i:s}}}} | label2 = 24-hour time (CET) | data2 = {{Time|CET|dst=no|df-cust=H:i:s|hide-refresh=yes}} | label3 = .beat time (BMT) | data3 = {{nowrap|@{{#expr: floor( {{#expr:{{#expr:{{#expr:{{#time:H|now + 1 hour}}3600}}+{{#expr:{{#time:i}}60}}+{{#time:s}}}}/86.4}} )}}}} }}

Day 1: we’ll adopt a simple markup language because our users are not programmers

Day 2: our users have complicated needs so we’ll basically reinvent Lisp expressions, but worse.

Day N: whatever this markup language is

——

I’ve seen this happen so many times it’s not even funny anymore. Well, at least it’s not YAML.

> so we’ll basically reinvent Lisp expressions, but worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Ironically it wasn't even intentional. Wikipedia users discovered a way to create an if statement by themselves, originally there was no conditionals.

Anyways, now a days you can use lua, so most of the wikisyntax is just glue code calling a lua program

I always found it ironic that the table syntax is designed to resemble ascii-art type tables, and then literally nobody writes it in a way that looks like an ascii art table.

Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

But the spaces around | make it easier to read, than, say, CSV.

Honestly it continually surprises me how people forget about TSV

It's the perfect format, more or less! CSV, but no difficulty around commas, and the only major risk being an editor that converts tabs to spaces

I agree it's great, but that risk is so major that I stopped using it. "There's a 50% chance that your editor will invisibly corrupt the data you enter, and another 30% chance to corrupt the entire file" is just not usable...

Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

You'd think more editors would be smart enough to recognize that it's a TSV file and therefore should preserve the tabs, in much the same way that you'd think editors would be smart enough to recognize that something's a Makefile and therefore should preserve the tabs.

It gets tricky when you have a TSV inside Markdown. I don’t think I’ve ever seen tabs used for indentation in Markdown in the wild, though it probably does work.

We could, however, make the Tab key insert spaces if the cursor is in the beginning of a line, and a literal \t if it’s in the middle. This way, you can write a TSV table pretty much anywhere you want.

Lack of control over your editor's behaviour shouldn't be acceptable on this level. Just like making tabs/spaces visible, control like this ahould be a basic feature of every editor.

> Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

Even vim lets you set that per-buffer so that's more of an editor problem than anything else, lmao

> Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

For now. I get the feeling we'll have tooling everywhere that does this soon.

I was recently tab-completing a Markdown table and whatever autocomplete model I had just fixed the table up without any intervention.

Yeah, it’s not terribly hard to do that even without AI (Prettier can do it, for example). But there’s a lot of places where the tooling just isn’t available. Then again, it’s probably not a big deal if your GitHub comment markup isn’t perfect.

I think the root of the problem is, almost everything else you use in Markdown is easy to do by hand. There’s just no good syntax for tables like this, I guess.

Often enough I just make a regular html table, the 'pandoc -f html -t mediawiki' or 'pandoc -f html -t markdown' as the case may be.

It's basically wordpress era PHP templating.

I’ve spent countless hours at employers fixing Xwiki syntax errors mixed with HTML. The parsing engine must be complex

That's putting it lightly, since Mediawiki templates are Turing-complete.

I'm not up to speed on my parsers anymore, but I believe Parsoid remains the most complete implementation, while mwlib is a reasonable compromise.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers#Known_imp...

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