[Wikipedia-l] New wiki markup

[Jan Hidders]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 12:24:21PM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> 
> So here's a radical proposal: take more advantage of CSS to allow us 
> gurus to prettify articles without complicating the wikitext.  Create 
> some method of attaching an inline stylesheet to a page or group of 
> pages, and put things like image floats, table backgrounds, padding, 
> fonts, and so on in the style sheet, and leave the wikitext alone.
> 
> Of course, that will require some way for the stylesheet to identify 
> elements in the wikitext.  We can auto-number things like images and 
> tables, and use IDs, e.g., "#image1 {float:left; padding-
> right:10px;}", etc.

What happens if somebody inserts a new table/figure? You renumber? And the
complexity step from doing no formatting to doing a little formatting becomes
relatively big.

Couldn't we just try a little harder to come up with a WikiWiki markup?
There is already table markup that does column-spanning, border
selection and alignment of text in cells. With a little effort we could
probably also add cells that span rows and background colors.

And how about

  << float left <<
  >> float right >>
  >> center <<

for tables and figures?

And do we really need colored text?

-- Jan Hidders