.
There are several problems between Crossmark and Creole that are much harder and more complicated than described here. First of all, you claim that there are only few incompatiblities, but this is obviously untrue. There are few problems if you want to use Crossmark-formatted documents in Creole-compatible wikis, that's true. But there are many, many troubles if you try to do it the other way around. To just name the few:
- Crossmark has very unforgiving markup for lists, reuiring 4-space indentation per level and various whitespaces. Implementing it in Creole would make MixedMode impossible.
- Crossmark uses indetation for syntax.
- Crossmark requires the trailing equal signs in headings.
- Crossmark's emphasis markup is extremely complicated and, I'm afraid, incompatible in most corner cases with Creole.
- Crossmark requires a number of features, such as specific macros, that are intentionally left unhandled in Creole.
- Creole doesn't have markup for monospace text.
- Crossmark's markup uses english words. This is impossible for Creole.
- Crossmark's heading markup conflicts with Creole's horizontal line markup.
I think that forcing Creole to be compatible with Crossmark would render it pretty much unusable for wikis -- especially in MixedMode.
Btw. Crossmark used to be much more compatible with Creole, but undergo a number of pretty arbitrary changes (like the link syntax, for example).
-- RadomirDopieralski, 2007-01-18
I tried hard to bridge the gap with Crossmark and we came to compromises and then suddenly at the last minute our cooperation flew out the window as Crossmark got pressured by another group (I believe Markdown) for changes. I, however, don't know the political pressures OLPC is under (but I imagine there are many), but it is very discouraging to work together so much and then suddenly see everything disappear in the end. Before that huge amount of Crossmark change that came suddenly before publication of its spec, Creole and Crossmark were quite compatible. I still am greatly saddened by this change.
-- ChuckSmith, 2007-Jan-18
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 voilà, conflict removed.
-- RaphLevien 2007-01-18