Rob Church wrote:
While browsing UseMod, as I almost never do, I came across the following interesting comment on http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiCreole:
"Several wiki engines have agreed to jump on board (including MediaWiki and the Ward's original WikiWikiWeb)."
We have, have we? I was under the impression that we couldn't even standardise our own markup, let alone support something else; I also got the impression from the recent discussions in response to the "announcement" that several developers did not see a significant benefit in supporting it.
The question, then, is where this impression came from, and whether it is correct; I'm directing this one at the release manager (Brion), and his senior assistant (Tim). If the impression is false, then who on Earth expressed this support?
It's probably based on my saying I might try to implement an experimental mode for MediaWiki when I had time, which I have never had time to do.
IMHO this creole thing is a dead-end, just as the attempts to do WYSIWYG editing by transcoding back and forth between wikitext and HTML. The long-term future of wiki text handling is most likely going to be WYSIWYG based on an HTML/XML backend.
I see no benefit to mucking about to make a half-compatible, frequently-breaking alternate-wikitext mode.
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)