Hi all,

Not long ago I have stumbled upon Brion's presentation at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Parser_and_Editor_-_Haifa... and I think I have something interesting to tell you folks about.

Over a year ago me and my friend have started to create an intuitive, multipurpose and flexible wiki markup syntax. Looking back now I think we did a good job (and you can see it yourself, below) but that's not the main point of this message.

I have written a PHP framework implementing descent recursive processing of a (wiki) document into corresponding DOM. Produced tree can be serialized into a binary format for storage/transmission or dumped (rendered) into different representations such as HTML or plain text (or FB2, XML, RTF, etc., etc.) - if each node supports the target format.

Even though the project haven't got enough members yet we have developed several child projects that use the aforementioned framework - a fast blog engine and a JavaScript editor (incomplete). The latter is particularly interesting because it makes full use of per-node editing (e.g. text node -> bold fragment -> paragraph -> entire document) - and unlike solutions built on top of HTML/raw wiki code this one is 100% accurate since it relies on the document tree itself.

What's also interesting about the framework is that in itself it and its DOM are markup-independent so, say, if a MediaWiki markup module is written it will allow the frontend (the wiki engine or something else) seamlessly operate on documents of both old and new syntaxes. Moreover, the compat module can support rendering into the new markup marking it transparent to migrate to the new format, if necessary.

The project home page is: http://uverse.i-forge.net/wiki There's a concise but complete description of our markup language and our plans; you can experiment with the markup there, as well as find links to related sites and more in-depth articles. JavaScript editor page: http://uverse.i-forge.net/wiki/demo/Pages/Swacked

The global goal of the project is to create a uniform markup syntax for all electronic texts and standardize it to allow 3rd party implementations.