What happens if somebody inserts a new table/figure? You renumber? And the complexity step from doing no formatting to doing a little formatting becomes relatively big.
That's why I'm throwing the suggestion out there--to get feedback.
Couldn't we just try a little harder to come up with a WikiWiki markup? There is already table markup that does column-spanning, border selection and alignment of text in cells.
I really hate MoinMoin syntax. It's every bit as ugly and complex as HTML, without the benefits.
<< float left <<
float right >> center <<
for tables and figures?
Not bad, but "<" and ">" are already something of a hassle; perhaps less if HTML goes away.
But the upshot of my proposal is that there already exists a technology for separating content and visual styling, and that we should do exactly that. Style is important, and we need to be able to let people create attractive articles that take advantage of the technology, so we need /more/ style elements. But content and style really are separate things, and the more wikisyntax we create for the purpose of style, the more it becomes a bloated, non-standard new language that does only half the job. I disagree with Toby about HTML, but I agree with him that just reinventing the wheel with a new non-standard language isn't a solution. CSS gives us an opportunity to really do it right: let the gurus tweak the style as much as they want, while still letting the regular folk see the content unobscured by megabytes of markup.
And do we really need colored text?
Absolutely. It's a function of the technology we have, and we should take advantage of it where it's useful (without overdoing it, of course). See [[Poker]], for example. Those articles would be much less readable and useful without red text and suit symbols.
Let for formally solicit proposals: folks, give me a clean, unobtrusive, user interface for (1) specifying spans and divs in wikitext with class and/or id; (2) attaching a stylesheet to a page, and being able to edit it.