Through this mailing-list, I see that we are struggling with Wikitext, which is a time-consuming work. What I suggest is, instead of wasting more time, we can change to XML, which is clearer, easy to parse, easy to understand and easy to extend.
You want an XML based language for describing the formatting of webpages? Basically, you're suggesting we switch to XHTML (with more some features removed and a few added). XHTML is much harder to learn and use than wikitext, even for experienced users.