Topic on User talk:Quiddity (WMF)/Flow

I wanted to thank you for adding a 'Discussion moving to' summary link to the closed discussion. It is greatly appreciated.

P.S. I ran into a Unable to parse content due to a Parsoid failure while writing to you. I then started testing to replicate the problem, and I accidentally clicked save on a test post. Flow won't let me actually delete my botched save (I pointed out the no-delete design flaw before). So I edited this undeleteable post, and edited the "test" title, to turn it back into my original message.

I spent quite a while testing, but I couldn't figure out exactly what I did to trigger the Unable to parse content due to a Parsoid failure error. I'll give you as much of a report as I can. It started out with this text:

I wanted to thank you for adding a 'Discussion moving to' summary link to the closed discussion. It is ''greatly appreciated.

Note the '' before the word greatly, where I tried to add italics in visual mode. I then switched to Wiki mode, and I thought it odd that Flow put the nowiki tag starting at the apostrophy before the word Discussion. So I made a randomish edit... no clear plan in mind.... I don't recall exactly what I did.... it's possible I left an un-paired nowiki tag. I just wanted to see what Flow would do when I flipped back and forth between Visual and Wiki modes. Each time I flipped to visual and back, Flow re-wrote it differently each time. Flow was applying an unstable round-trip transformation. After about 4 round trips it crapped out with Unable to parse content due to a Parsoid failure.

It's a serious design flaw that Flow constantly translates and translates the content, with no underlying "fixed reality". This is why it keeps mangling stuff. With Talk pages, wikitext is the fixed reality, and it simply gets rendered.

Thanks for these notes, and the new topic at Talk:Collaboration/Workflows. I'm going to be away for the next few days, but will get back to it a.s.a.p.