There has been much talk about a potential WikiMarkupStandard, but so far not much has happened. There is however a new attempt to fully discuss that topic, this time on an official mailing list (an ID/RFC is planned):
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiMarkupStandardWorkingGroup
Discussions may be lengthy and not all too pleasant for everyone (any standard can only be a big collection of compromises), and initial debates may be very lame I fear. However I'd like to invite any interested from the WikiMedia crew and user base, so we can also have your thoughts, opinions and preferences heard. That's important to get the best possible out of this process - a markup standard that only very few people agree on isn't worth anything; and because MediaWiki is one of the most widespread engines and most people first learn WikiWikiWeb by it, it is surely the most interesting.
It hasn't started yet, we'll first have to negotiate on a few basic "meta rules" for what the markup standard should look like. My opinion is, that it should only be a 'recommendation' and nothing more. Merely promoting the "best" markup and mentioning a few viable alternatives. All WikiEngines should be free to add as many extensions as possible (that's the biggest advantage of Wiki anyhow, and shall remain it). And it's likely that we negotiate on a general MIME media type as well, so "Content-Type: text/wiki; variant=mediawiki" could be used with WebDav, AtomApi protocols and eventually even EMail in the future.
Ok, I don't want to go in too deep detail here. Please anyone consider taking part in that discussion; it would help if we could hear all ideas up front - there will be a final WikiWorldWide voting or such, but problems and incompatibilities should be worked out as early as possible of course.
Best, mario
(please Cc: me, unsubscribing again)
Mario Salzer wrote:
It hasn't started yet, we'll first have to negotiate on a few basic "meta rules" for what the markup standard should look like. My opinion is, that it should only be a 'recommendation' and nothing more. Merely promoting the "best" markup and mentioning a few viable alternatives. All WikiEngines should be free to add as many extensions as possible (that's the biggest advantage of Wiki anyhow, and shall remain it). And it's likely that we negotiate on a general MIME media type as well, so "Content-Type: text/wiki; variant=mediawiki" could be used with WebDav, AtomApi protocols and eventually even EMail in the future.
Some of us (well, one of us, Timwi, but I'm planning on joining the effort;-) are working on a mediawiki-to-XML parser, a "real" one, not the usual regexp stuff otherwise used on wikis. This seems to be an ideal intermediate format, as that XML standard is not fully established yet, and can contain any number of extensions. It has the potential to describe any given wiki source. All it needs is * a wiki-to-XML parser, which we will likely have soon for mediawiki, and which should be relatively easy to adapt to other flavors * a XML-to-wiki "generator", which is dead-easy to implement by following the XML tree and appending the text and appropriate wiki markup to a long string
Imagine : "mediawiki2xml source.txt >xml2usemodwiki" as a converter, to produce human-editable texts. Any wiki can keeps its own markup variant and still be compatible with all the others. Also, the XML should be easier to parse by mail programs, web browsers and who-knows-what than *any* conceivable wiki markup.
Magnus
On Monday 04 October 2004 21:58, Magnus Manske wrote:
Any wiki can keeps its own markup variant and still be compatible with all the others. Also, the XML should be easier to parse by mail programs, web browsers and who-knows-what than *any* conceivable wiki markup.
imho an end user would be more happy with as less different markups to learn as possible. the best thing about such a converter is imho that many wikis using proprietary markup could be converted to a new standard easily.
d
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org