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