(anonymous guest) (logged out)

Copyright (C) by the contributors. Some rights reserved, license BY-SA.

Sponsored by the Wiki Symposium and the Nuveon GmbH.

 

Add new attachment

Only authorized users are allowed to upload new attachments.

This page (revision-4) was last changed on 19-Jan-2007 21:55 by RadomirDopieralski  

This page was created on 18-Jan-2007 09:15 by 150.254.78.41

Only authorized users are allowed to rename pages.

Only authorized users are allowed to delete pages.

Difference between version and

At line 21 added 42 lines
I can't claim to know all the politics, but I suspect the biggest problem is just lack of communication. Crossmark has a significant (potential) user community in providers of open book-like pedagogical texts, and they have some specific needs that are well-addressed by "traditional" markup languages. But I don't think the fundamental needs are all that different. After all, Wikipedia is one of the most successful such projects.
Ivan has, in email, expressed a strong willingness to work towards unification. Let's try to listen to the needs of their user communities before we just decide that cooperation is impossible.
Thanks, Radomir, for reading the specs and coming up with problems. I should have said that my list is by no means exhaustive. Let me address your points one-by-one:
----
Crossmark has very unforgiving markup for lists, requiring 4-space indentation per level and various whitespaces. Implementing it in Creole would make MixedMode impossible.
* You're absolutely right that this is a discrepancy I didn't address. Again, I believe it's possible to implement both multiple bullet and indentation in a bastard hybrid, but it's certainly a wart that would be worth resolving.
Crossmark uses indentation for syntax.
* Yes. But we have substantial support for whitespace characters being interpreted meaningfully in another discussion, so I don't see this as a showstopper.
Crossmark requires the trailing equal signs in headings.
* Trivial (but see "Outcomes" section in the main article).
Crossmark's emphasis markup is extremely complicated and, I'm afraid, incompatible in most corner cases with Creole.
* Yes. That is exactly the tradeoff between single and double character markup. Single character markup has much more complicated whitespace rules and is much less flexible for things like subword styling. On the plus side, it's less typing, less of a visual interruption, and extremely natural, as it can be seen in ASCII texts going back decades.
Crossmark __requires__ a number of features, such as specific macros, that are intentionally left unhandled in Creole.
* This is really a discussion about subsets and supersets. See "Outcomes".
Creole doesn't have markup for monospace text.
* Feature or bug?
Crossmark's markup uses english words. This is impossible for Creole.
* Crossmark is extremely (one might say primarily) concerned with international use cases. My sense is that the bread-and-butter markup does not use words, but the fancier stuff does. Restricting ourselves to "line noise" makes it very difficult to extend in certain directions, such as metadata in images and so on. I think the Crossmark solution is a useful compromise.
Crossmark's heading markup conflicts with Creole's horizontal line markup.
* Not necessarily. All you have to do is require a blank line before the separator, and voilĂ , conflict removed.
-- RaphLevien 2007-01-18
Version Date Modified Size Author Changes ... Change note
4 19-Jan-2007 21:55 7.958 kB RadomirDopieralski to previous differences in goals
3 18-Jan-2007 19:21 5.078 kB RaphLevien to previous | to last responses
2 18-Jan-2007 11:31 2.122 kB 141.7.56.2 to previous | to last collaboration on Crossmark
1 18-Jan-2007 09:15 1.478 kB 150.254.78.41 to last further conflicts with Crossmark
« This page (revision-4) was last changed on 19-Jan-2007 21:55 by RadomirDopieralski