At last, some people want to unify Wiki markups! ;-)
A little bit about me. My first language is French so, sorry if my English sounds a little weird from time to time. I work as a software architect/lead developer for a large telecommunication company in Canada (my opinions expressed on this Web site are my own). I also have a broad experience with software usability.
I've been a very heavy user of wikis for the last 7 years mainly for internal projects - my team documents all of our software development in wikis (FlexWiki, MediaWiki, TWiki, TikiWiki, TRAC, XWiki, etc.). I'm also working really hard to install and implement wikis in my clients' organizations especially in their software development environments.
One of my goal, is to find, someday that we use, as humans, only one type of markups to write text quickly and efficiently for blogs, wikis, newsgroups, emails, readme files, ... The SGML family is great for structured or semi structured documents/data but it sucks when you have to write plain old text files with formatting by hand.
So, to give back to the community, I would really like to contribute to this wonderful effort.
If you want to contact me personally, you can write me at "first letter of my first name + full last name at g mail dot com (no spaces, no plus sign)".
What I like about Creole is that it could be the One Ring to Rule Them All (just kidding)! Seriously, with the broad support from wiki developers, it could be this spec that makes the unification possible in the long run. If we could get OLPC involved (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Crossmark
), it would be another great asset.
IMHO, the specification should not include any rendering i.e. (X)HTML suggestions. It should express the meaning of the markup accompanied by a very precise syntax.
My general position is to keep the standard as simple but as rich as possible for the user, two goals that are somewhat opposite, while minimizing the effect on existing WikiMLs. It should allow for a variety of writing styles so it can be accepted quickly. For example:
- __ , and should be accepted for emphasis letting the [language-dependant] implementation decides of the rendering.
- There should be a way to specify table headings because it has more semantic meanings than formatting.
- Markup extensions should be standardized (Plugin insertion failed: Could not find plugin placeholderPlugin insertion failed: Could not find plugin placeholder is a good start), allowing qualities on markup such as:
|<<special style for cell/row/column>>R1C1|R1C2| ==<<special style for heading>> Heading 2 ==
- There should be a difference between preformatted text and multiline quoted text (emphasis with indentation perhaps?)
- An Escape character... Please, please...