.
Welcome Gregor! Thank you for your interest, we need both feedback and ideas like yours.
I will try to address some of your questions -- you probably have found the answers already by reading the incredible mess we made of this wiki, but even then it's good to have some pointers and notes.
Creole already distinguishes preformatted blocks of text, created like this:
this is preformatted text
and nowiki spans, created like this: this is nowiki span. We have mentioned recently in the discussions about escape character the possibility to introduce a separate markup for monospaced text -- but there is no formal proposal yet.
The lack of line wrapping on this particular wiki is a result of a bug in its cascading style sheets -- it is certainly possible to wrap lines inside a <PRE> block, and even mark which line ends are original and which were inserted to wrap text.
If you want to put formatting inside links because it is meaningful -- how are you going to encode that formating in the page's title? Most wiki engines have pretty strict rules regarding page names, Creole has no power to force the developers to extend them. Lack of formatting inside links encourages users to pick a representation that will not be lost in the page title -- due to formatting being stripped to fit the page naming rules. It's similar to why headings don't have to contain links.
Placeholder is not intended as a general extension markup -- but there is the MultilinePlaceholderProposal which spawned some discussion about a markup for macros, plugins and similar extensions.
As for Creole being the One To Rule Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them -- I don't think it is possible. There are very good reasons behind the proliferation of wiki markups. The markup of original wiki wasn't that bad -- and the wikis created based on it usually didn't change the worst parts -- they usually just changed enough simple and irrelevant details to be different. Thus, a markup that is simply best , even if it was possible to design it, woudn't really stand a chance. There already were attempts to standarize wiki markup -- there is even an RFC somewhere. But wiki is a tool used for humans for communication with other humans -- not with computer -- so the language used will have all the fuziness of natural language, and there is nothing that can be done about it.
Creole has different goals: first of all, to define the most common things that everybody can agree on. If there is something that the developers can't agree on -- it's best just left outside the specification. It's better to have a widely adopted and working standard for even very basic functionality, than a complete standard existing only on paper.
Note how it still increases interoperability of wiki engines -- maybe not to the point where you can just switch engines and copy the page database -- but this would never be possible anyways, because of different feature sets that the engines have.
The most important thing we hope to achieve with Creole is interoperability in terms of switching users, not engines. That is, a user can "visit" some wiki, add some text to pages, leave some comments, etc. without haveing to invest his time into learning a new markup. This makes the barrier smaller, brings wiki communities closer together.
Another goal of this project, apart from creating the specification, is provoking some dialogue between the wiki developers, making them communicate and exchange ideas and experiences, and document them in form of this wiki. We hope that even if wiki developers will not want to adapt Creole, they can still benefit from our work.
-- RadomirDopieralski, 2007-02-26