Jimbo> I don't know anything about how formal standards are
proposed and decided, but just as with HTML, it seems
that
wiki syntax is a natural for some standardization.
I do know something of the process, having participated in it for PNG,
and have done some work toward a cleaner wiki syntax already. The
hardest part, as already mentioned, is that there is a pretty large
installed base of other wikis and lots of divergent opinions on what's
good and bad about each of them. Yes, prehaps our position as the
largest one gives us some leverage.
Magnus> There's another way:
* Agree on a XML standard for wikis
* Each wiki system writes a wiki-to-XML and XML-to-wiki function
Well, for "XML standard" substitute "Semantic model" and you've
got a
good start. Once you have the model, then you can express it in XML to
allow data-sharing, but we'd still want to work toward standardising the
user experience.
AsciiDoc <http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/> impresses me as a step
in the right direction, but the model needs to be expanded to include
a few wiki-specific things.
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee(a)piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>