Jeremy Cowgar wrote: > <div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">I don't > care if I type **bold** or <b>bold</b>. However, I dislike: > > <ol> > <li>Item One > > Or worse yet, table structures. Isn't: > > * Item One > ** Item One.One > > a bit easier? > > BTW... No one is asking you to learn 5 wiki syntaxes a day. There are > 3 major wiki syntaxes, Markdown, Textile and Creole. You will likely > run into them in other areas of your programming life as well. We are > simply asking that a set standard be adopted so you don't have to deal > with everyone has their own idea. We are also asking that it be > adopted wholly. > > There are only a small handful of popular wiki languages. Some > implementations may have more or less features (e.g., Markdown > implementations in various languages), but in the case of Markdown at > least there is a common core with a test suite which nearly all > implementations pass. > First, Fossil's markup (http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/wiki_rules) has simple block-level constructs for paragraphs, lists and hyperlinks, with HTML for everything else. This means you already get the "easier" syntax you referred to.
Second your statistics and assumptions are horribly wrong. Wiki engine popularity is notoriously hard to measure, but there are a couple of well-regarded resources, such as http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/WikiPopularity and http://c2.c2.com/cgi/wiki?TopTenWikiEngines. There have also been a couple of in-depth market share surveys, e.g. Water & Stone (http://www.waterandstone.com/downloads/2008OpenSourceCMSMarketSurvey.pdf). If you include content management systems, then 80% of the market is represented by Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal and PHP-Nuke. They all use HTML as their native markup for content. BBCode is popular in conjunction with PHP-Nuke, and although there are extensions for Wiki-type markup in Joomla! and Drupal they are not popular (as in: not widely deployed). In the domain of Wiki engines only, MediaWiki is without question the leader in terms of the likelihood of interacting with it (i.e. of all Wikis, you are most likely to have to use MediaWiki syntax). MediaWiki does not support CREOLE, nor textile nor markdown. It supports a broad subset of HTML for markup beyond simple block and element formatting. Other popular / widely used Wiki engines include DokuWiki, Twiki, PhpWiki, and MoinMoin. Of these none support CREOLE (DokuWiki and TWiki can by plugin), only DokuWiki supports Markdown (by plugin), and TWiki / DokuWiki support textile (by plugin). All except DokuWiki support (at least a subset of) HTML. The native Wiki syntax of all of these wikis are different: they all have different markup for internal & external links, headlines, bold/italics/underline, images, bulleted and numbered lists. In the world of development tools with Wiki support, Trac seems to be the leader (although I don't have definitive statistics on that). Trac supports something like MoinMoin syntax, but not quite. Using similar methodologies to those used to derive the market shares above, it is quite easy to show that Markdown, Textile and reStructuredText have such tiny market share (except in certain niche markets) that they don't even start the race. Perl's POD is more widely used than any of them, as is BBCode. In short there are only a handful of popular Wiki syntaxes, if you have really REALLY big hands. And markdown, textile, and creole are not among them. Regards, Twylite _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
