Creole should allow users to escape markup characters (or all non-alphanumeric characters) with a special character - for example backslash ("\"). It's often faster to type and more readable than using nowiki (3+3 curly braces). In order to allow spaces in front of lists, which is a quite common practice in wiki engines, it should be a escape character other than space.
This way, stars, slashes and other markup characters, when found in the original text, can be easily escaped, to be rendered as themselves.
The special escape character, when put before alpha-numeric characters, could be rendered as itself (no escape).
If backslash is chosen as escape character, then it's to be noted that it cannot be used to escape itself. In fact, two consecutive backslashes are converted to a line-break. (Solution: to introduce one or more backslashes where they wouldn't be allowed by other rules, each of them should be followed by a space - which won't be rendered).
If an escape character is defined, then it would be possible to keep the existing nowiki syntax as it is (rendered as monospace). The escape character could be used to have Creole markup in the output, even not monospaced.
Backslash as escape character is Not New. See:
- http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#backslash
- http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#escaping
Backslash is already used in creole for line breaks, leading to confusing wiki text for endusers. A character that is not used otherwise in Creole is a tilde. This is not new as well and would be easy to parse.
Escaping Lists and Headings markup
5 ~- 10 ~==== ~- 5
Escaping Nowiki Markup
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}}}