Tim Starling wrote:
Unfortunately one type of wheel doesn't fit every car. XML is designed to be primarily machine-readable and unambiguous, human-readability and ease of authorship is a secondary consideration. I once read an article by Tim Berners-Lee (?), saying among other things that users ultimately should not see XML except in exceptional circumstances, and that automated tools will be created to author it.
Wiki markup, on the other hand, is primarily designed to be easy to create and easy to read. Concerns such as the ease of parser design and avoiding ambiguity are decidedly secondary.
I agree with this completely. Now, obviously we should be very careful about falling into any "reinventing the wheel" syndromes, or any "not invented here" syndromes, etc. But wiki markup serves a very different function from HTML or XML.
--Jimbo