Topic on Talk:VisualEditor/Design/Software overview

Structured content blocks containing annotated text can provide a way to represent WikiText in a sufficiently abstract manner, allowing WikiText to be parsed, modified and rendered back into WikiText without loss of information, as well as rendered into a variety of formats including a variety of styles of HTML, such as HTML4 or HTML5, a simplified form of HTML for mobile devices, or non HTML formats such as PDF or plain text.

Imho, it would be quite interesting to give users including programs a choice of formats to select from for various purposes, including somewhat selective outputs like sections, the table of contents, ressource description formats, references for quotations (aka current Special:Cite), etc. - For instance, if one wants to quote from an article when writing a paper, one could ask for a section in LaTex or .rtf format, paste it in their work, open a footnote, copy the appropriate BibTeX entry from the page's Special:Cite page, close the footnote, and be done without having to worry about converting formats.

Moving comment from page into LQT discussion (Peachey88).

This, and many other use cases should be easily supported since the official structure will be in a generic and easy to convert format (we are calling WikiDom, but it's just and ordered map tree that's easily encoded into JSON).

This post was posted by Trevor Parscal (WMF), but signed as Trevor Parscal.