[whatwg] [html5] Semantic elements and spec complexity

[David Gerard]

2009/2/11 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:

> So the tricky one is to write a language definition that does
> something meaningful with tag soup. Because "tag soup" is what human
> languages are too, and they're learned in a similar fashion (try stuff
> and see if it works).


Oh - and the way MediaWiki (the engine Wikipedia uses) deals with this
is: there *is* no language definition - it's a series of PHP regular
expressions. The parser is the actual definition of wikitext. This is
horrifying in both big and small detail, of course. Also, the language
is provably impossible to put into EBNF form. Argh.


- d.