I've been workin' on a plaintext markup syntax for the purpose of providing rich formatting capabilities in article submission to laypeople. A syntax similar to the variants used in wikies, but much more consistent, much more coherent, and (I would say) much more intelligently designed. I'll start implementing the begins of logic and regular expressions for parsing the syntax very soon. I just want to get some preliminary feedback on what I've come up with thus far. There is a lot about Wikitax where I'm still not set in stone, or where I'm questioning myself, or where I just haven't thought much about how to solve that particular problem. I could use other minds in helpin' to flesh out the final stages of Wikitax. Anybody wanna take a look and offer ideas, suggestions, additions, etc.? I've put quite a lot of thought into the syntax, and why things should be the way they are. Hopefully it's pretty obvious to everybody, but I would really appreciate input and help. I figure the more minds that attack this problem, the better the solution will be.

Out of all the wiki syntaxes, I enjoy Wikipedia's syntax the most. I remember the first time I came across a WikiWikiWeb. The early syntax was just shit. And most wikies still have really crappy syntax. Even though Wikipedia has evolved the syntax in a number of nice ways, it still feels lacking in many areas. It would also be nice to have a specification to standardize plaintext markups: a syntax so consistant, other projects will pick it up and use it.

I started work on this because I'm doing a lot of development on a second generation community-developed/organized open publishing content management system for Independent Media Centers. The particular codebase I'm working on is going to be a sort of Wikipedia + scoop + multimedia galleries/archives + weblogs + newswire + Kronolith + etc.--all tightly rolled into one nice, easy-to-use, and consistent package.

You'll find an attached text/plain, Wikitax.txt. The preliminary specification is contained therein.

If you're sincere about contributing, see also: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitax

Peace out, g-money homey lokes,

Derek

_________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 3 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail&xAPID=42&PS=47575&PI... http://www.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/getmsg&HL=1216hotmailtaglines_stopmor...