On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Mark A. Hershberger mah@everybody.orgwrote:
Perhaps this is where we can cooperate more with other Wiki writers to develop a common Wiki markup. From my brief perusal of efforts, it looks like there is a community of developers involved in http://www.wikicreole.org/ but MediaWiki involvement is lacking (http://bit.ly/hYoki3 — for a email from 2007(!!) quoting Tim Starling).
We poked a bit at the early days of the WikiCreole project, but never really saw it as something that would solve any of the problems that MediaWiki had. I was at the meeting at WikiSym 2006 in Denmark where some of the creole syntax bits got hammered out, and if anything that helped convince me that it wasn't going to do us good to continue on that path.
As long as we're hung up on details of the markup syntax, it's going to be very very hard to make useful forward motion on things that are actually going to enhance the capabilities of the system and put creative power in the hands of the users.
Forget about syntax -- what do we want to *accomplish*?
Requiring people to do all their document creation at this level is like asking people to punch binary ASCII codes into cards by hand -- it's low-level grunt work that computers can handle for us. We have keyboards and monitors to replace punchcards; not only has this let most people stop worrying about memorizing ASCII code points, it's let us go beyond fixed-width ASCII text (a monitor emulating a teletype, which was really a friendlier version of punch cards) to have things like _graphics_. Text can be in different sizes, different styles, and different languages. We can see pictures; we can draw pictures; we can use colors and shapes to create a far richer, more creative experience for the user.
GUIs didn't come about from a better, more universal way of encoding text -- Unicode came years after GUI conventions were largely standardized in practice.
-- brion