Wiki markup isn't too bad

It's also taken nine years *just to write a spec* for markdown (commonmark started 2014, latest version just published 2024-01-28). Things which look simple on the surface can be surprisingly hard to nail *all the way down*.

And that's the case for wikitext, for sure. Parsoid has been in production use since 2012, and has powered all the mobile apps for almost as long. Many many other WMF projects have been using Parsoid HTML for a decade. Before we completely ditch the old legacy parser, however, we need to make sure that 99.<some number of nines>% of Wikipedia's >100M pages are bug-for-bug compatible, because we take seriously our duty as custodians of the knowledge base which is Wikipedia and the WMF projects. At this point you might consider our work more 'archivist' then 'engineer', in that our main effort isn't the parser, per se, but preserving the rendering of existing articles.

The goal of Parsoid is to render pages into well-specified semantic HTML, which preserves all the meaningful information (template boundaries, template arguments, invisible constructs, etc) of the original wikitext. This isn't *just* to allow us to use an HTML editor and round-trip back to the original wikitext, it also paves the way for other editors and markup languages in the future: as long as it can round-trip to and from "MediaWiki DOM Spec" HTML, you can use it to edit wikipedia.

More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cscott/Ideas/A_Dozen_V...