[WMS] Re: Pre-cursor to wiki markup standard

  • From: Mario Salzer <mario@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 23:28:30 +0200

Andrew Premdas wrote:
> By creating a functionality standard first you would have a good place for
> starting discussions about syntax and markup. This would also provide an
> opportunity to clean up ambiguous and overlapping terms e.g. emphasis,
> strong emphasis, bold, italic. Also to determine whether functionality
> should be included in the core (perhaps large and small text shouldn't be in
> because they are a type of emphasis).

What should have preceeded this mailing list, was a complete Wiki markup
research. Nobody has currently an overview of what markup variations are
in use and what they are used for (and how often, how well, btw). It was 
a bit more difficult than having a graph of WikiEngine descendants and
so...

It's a too big task to do this now, the spreadsheet can only partially
help over this. It's a good start however, and eventually allows us to
differentiate a few major markup variations / trees. We also get a
limited overview of what is in use already.

Since we are unlikely to negotiate on any extravagant publishing markup
features, the list of what functionality we need is also rather clear.
MeatBall:WikiMarkupStandard, the spreadsheet, Tiki:RFCWiki give us nice
check lists, of what we should consider to standardize. (Our WikiMarkup
is in use already a while, so one would expect, that the most important
stuff is already there anyhow ;)

But Andrew, I'd like to contradict you in one point. Not all terms that
we use overlap. As I feel we need that distinction, I wish to point
out, that "emphasis" and "italic" are two different things. Nowadays
browsers present it the same - but only per default, and it makes a lot
of sense to me to let users use <i> for italic text, but also provide a
special CSS and markup rule for <em> (for example a slightly red color,
instead of adding wiki markup for hundreds of colors - which not many
people would use in the end).
I make this distinction, because I see a big problem coming, with our
vote on the "best" markup for 'italic'. (There is '' and // in use...)

Best,
mario

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