Aims

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Aims and Objectives of Creole#

(this is a stub)

Preamble#

The original goals of creole were developed at WikiSym2006. and included goals which conflict with the generation of a clear specification such as a requirement to be CollisionFree, which implicitly suggests Creole is not so much a specificatiion of a form of wiki markup but is a compromise like the Israel-Palestinian "peace".

If Creole is to become a markup specification, then it will invariably collide with some other forms of markup, and it is about time it made those aims clear (otherwise I'm wasting my time here!!( indeed a markup inherently collides with the basic requirment for normal text editing where each and every character is defined as representing itself and therefore any other interpretation is a collission and so this is clearly an unachievable and unrelistic goal.

Audience#

This creole specification is intended to be read by those developing applications using markup to format text.

General Aims#

The aim of Creole is to mark up text so as to differentiate between sections, ascribing additional properties such as emphasis or marking as a heading to allow the application to convey this information through its own choice of formatting.

More specifically:

1. to specify generic relativetext formatting for free-flowing text providing the common elements used for headings, emphasis and notes, (i.e. leaving the actual choiceof font, actual, rather than relative, size, position on page margins,etc. to the implementation)
2. to create a markup specification useable across a range of applications
3. to create a markup useable across the range of different languages without a requirement to know English
4. to develop a logical and consistent syntax which is as intuitive as practical
5. to allow simple inline links: intra-page, intra-application and internet
6. to allow simple inline inclusion of images
7. to specify the bare minimum text layout formatting allowing paragraphs, newlines, lists, indents, and tables
8. to include provision for common text formatting including, levels of headings, codeblocks, horizontal lines, quotations, references and signatures
9. to make provision for application specific extensions

Creole Environment#

Creole describes the manner of display rather than the output to display. It takes raw text and describes how this will affect the characters shown to the user. In a typical environment such as the internet, the application will need to translate some characters to avoid conflict with e.g. HTML. Whilst creole is intended to work with HTML, the specification does not cover how creole will be translated for any particular use.