[wiki-standards] Re: proposed wiki markup standard - font changes & lists

[Filippo Salustri]

Quick self-intro: I'm a mechanical engineer, but don't hold that against 
me. :-)  I've been using wikis for a couple of years now, and am writing 
my own.  They're actually part of my research on tools for collaboration 
in design engineering.

Just 2 cents:

In my (limited) experience, I dunno if the * matter is such a big deal.

In my wiki engine (extremely germinal - http://deseng.ryerson.ca/xiki/), 
I use: *bold*, /italics/, */bold italics/*, and /*italics bold*/. 
Indeed, any reasonable combination works so long as the start and end 
syntax are mirror images.

The hardest part is dealing with the use of / (e.g. /http://x.y.com/ - 
does the last / end the italics or is it part of the URL?).  There's 
still some cases that fall thru the cracks, but they seem quite rare.

Bullet lists work like this:
* item
   * nested item
   # level 2 numbered item
     continuation of previous numbered item
   ? Term
   : Definition
# level 1 numbered item

Also, single newlines can be embedded in paragraphs (to make pasting 
from other sources less painful), and list items can be separated by 
blank lines without starting a new list.  I accept extra blank lines 
because it helps make the editable text rendering in a textarea cleaner 
looking.

While my "user community" is extremely limited (basically just my grad 
students), they have commented favourably on the wiki and have not found 
any egregious errors.

Like I said, just 2 cents.

Cheers.
Fil Salustri


Alex Schroeder wrote:
> Moving the discussion back to the list, as requested.  Sorry for my
> earlier message which went to the original recipients instead of the
> list. :)
> 
> Desilets, Alain schrieb:
>> I personally don't like having to type 6 quotes '''just to bold text'''.
>> At the same time, I think *bold* may conflict with the bullet point
>> syntax (what if you want to bold the first word of a paragraph).
> 
> I've been experimenting with this and have reached the following
> suboptimale compromise:
> 
> List items start with one * or more, followed by a space.
> 
> * Like this.
> 
> and
> 
> *not like this.
> 
> This gets rid of the ambiguity.
> 
> I've also been forced to support both *foo* and **foo**, /foo/ and
> //foo//, and _foo_ and __foo__. The version with a single punctuation
> character uses a restricted regular expression, and some exceptions,
> because of things like filenames including directories, innocent/common
> uses of these characters, and so on.
> 
> Thus, if we want to focus on the things that are simple to implement, we
> should limit ourselves to **foo**, //foo//, and __foo__, eventhough
> personally I prefer to use *foo*, /foo/, and _foo_ as far as possible.
> After all, that's what I use in email, too.
> 
> I rarely use ''foo'' and '''foo''' anymore. I'd just support this as way
> to not annoy other users.
> 
>> BTW. There is an additional markup that I think is missing from most
>> wiki markup schemes, namely that a newline should be rendered as a <BR>.
>>
>> I have observed countless people trying to create the equivalent of (in
>> HTML):
>>
>> This is the first line<BR>
>> There is no blank line between this line and the previous one
>>
>> By typing this in wiki markup:
>>
>> This is the first line
>> There is no blank line between this line and the previous one
>>
>> I'd say at least half of the people I have observed did that "mistake".
> 
> I've seen many new users trying this, because that's how it works in
> some blogs. At the same time, I have some users that use external
> editors that will insert newlines to break lines (Emacs). Those people
> would certainly not want newlines to turn into line breaks. Those are
> also the kind of people used to DocBook and LaTeX, of course.
> 
> I think there's no easy answer to this one.
> 
> Alex.
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: salustri at ryerson.ca
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/