Lars Aronsson wrote:
Is the wiki syntax going anywhere? Did somebody start work to standardize it?
There was a wiki markup standardization mailing list that started up a while back, then died out. (At least I haven't gotten any mail from it in months.) Last I remember, somebody made a big spreadsheet summarizing the basic markup in various different wikis.
Is anybody rethinking the difference between [[x]], [[x:y]], [[:x:y]], [[x|y]], [x:y], [x y], {{x|y}}, {{x|y=z}}, {{x|y=[[z]]}}, and [[x|{{y}}]]?
If we started over today, with today's experience but without today's legacy, would we make it similar or different?
Would [[image:x]] be implemented as {{image|x}} instead?
I'm not sure, but I think I was the idiot who suggested the [[Image:x]] syntax. It wouldn't have been so bad if we'd used [[File:x]] for the file description page, a change we might yet make but haven't got around to yet.
Making it more transclusion-looking instead of link-looking might be logical in a holistic way.
Would [http://url/ text] be replaced by [[http://url/ | text]]? Would that make "http:" and "isbn:" parallels to "image:" and "category:"?
I'd have preferred this for consistency, but we just inherited UseMod's syntax here and stuck with it.
What about making a scripting language for template definitions, so you can have conditions, loops and database fetches, almost like PHP? {{x|y=x}} ::= if ($y) then "see also: $y";
I'm really leery of complex templating -- especially anything allowing loops, that's a merry jaunt on the road to Denial of Service land.
And what about <math></math>?
/me runs away screaming :)
If I got this part of history right, the [[x]] syntax was introduced into the UseMod wiki software by Clifford Adams on request from the Wikipedia community early in 2001. Before that all wikis used CamelCase to make links, and that option was still available in Wikipedia for most of 2001.
According to legend, there were other wikis at that time allowing some form of free links, though UseMod may not have until then. I wasn't there at the time so can't really say.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)