News

From OLPC News (2006-10-14):

The OLPC document format spec rev2 has support for block macros, granular tables of contents, and layout hinting. The format is named “Crossmark,” and is believed to be highly suitable for (collaborative) book writing and editing and use as an e-book format.

Changes from Creole 0.1:

• Images now can have optional ALT text {{flower.png|alt text}}

View Creole 0.2.

From One Laptop per Child Community News 2006-09-23

15. In a related effort, Ivan has frozen Verison 1.0 of the document format used in the Journal (and wiki). The general datastore, differential storage engine, and indexing engine are also largely finished. A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor in progress, as well as a reference identity service/emergent public key infrastructure implementation.

After looking over and reviewing the comments over the weekend, we have included some recommended changes and have now launched a final Creole 0.1 spec. Thanks to everyone for contributing! Soon time to start working on Creole 0.2...

Final changes:

• changing hyphens to asterisks for unordered lists
• removed mixed lists

I posted a draft of Creole 0.1 and we believe all the rough edges have been smoothed out, but are still seeking comments and criticisms from the wiki community. Please leave your comments on Talk.Creole0.1. We plan to release a final spec on Monday (11-Sep-2006), so last day to comment on Creole 0.1 is this Sunday (10-Sep-2006).

Alex Schroeder has been developing a Creole Markup Extension for OddMuse. It is currently in use at the Wiki Ohana wiki.

WikiMatrix, a service which compares 65 wiki engines, has just added a wiki syntax comparison tool specifically for Wiki Creole. Here you can choose which element you would like to compare and then you can see how it is done in 65 wiki engines. Thanks Andreas Gohr for your help!

Last night I spoke at length with Ivan Krstić, the head of information architecture for the One Laptop per Child project. He wants to reach an agreement with us on a common markup syntax as they are currently researching the OLPC document format syntax and we noticed that by pure chance our syntax for unordered lists, ordered lists, bold and italics is already identical. They have tentatively agreed to change their link format to match ours.

We have agreed to be more tolerant with headers so that equal signs after the header would be acceptable and if the left and right side have a different number of equals signs, then the left side would determine the size. Also, considering that MediaWiki does not allow a single equal sign for a header, I would argue that we should not either and that level one headers (the largest) begin with two equal signs. We have also agreed that transclusion is too complicated for a simple markup like Creole and are looking at which markup would be best to display images.

Between the OLPC and Creole groups, we are now researching to see what would be the best markup for a horizontal ruler and preformatted/monospace text. I am also making a page Comparison with OLPC markup to help speed the process.