[wiki-standards] Hello - request comments on Creole

[Marc Laporte]

Hello Mike,

I am not sure I understand your aim ("to create a basic form of format 
that can be used across a wide range of applications from wikis, to 
blogs, to message boards, to private messages, to adverts for houses, to 
address lists for scouts").

That sounds like a Content Management System. There are over a hundred 
Open Source systems that you could work with:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/

By choosing an existing system, you'll get already mostly debugged code. 
You also have the opportunity to share your work & experience with a 
community.

Your analogy to a toupee made me laugh. On a related note, here is to 
encourage you to pursue your quest to offer wiki syntax:
http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Why+Wiki+Syntax+is+Important

IMHO, you should not be trying to write a parser from the specs. You 
should join an existing initiative, be it a wiki engine or a parser:
http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Engines

Best regards,


-- 
M ;-)

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/                                                            /
/ Marc Laporte           <|>          http://marclaporte.com /
/ Avantech.net           <|>             http://avantech.net /
/ TikiWiki CMS/Groupware <|> http://tikiwiki.org/marclaporte /
/                                                            /
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Mike Haseler wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've spent the last few weeks trying to come to grips with what is 
> optimistically called the creole "specification".
>
> I say "optimistically", because because even the very simplest things 
> like whether there can be a space between bold and the text isn't 
> defined. (ie **bold** vs. ** bold ** )
>
> I believe the problem stems from a total opposition of goals between 
> the project and my own requirements.
>
> Creole seems to be a "nice-to-have" list of "similarities" which you 
> "might like to implement" if you feel like it.
>
> In contrast, I just want a defined markup specification so that I can 
> be sure I am compatible without all the hassle of trying to work out 
> what this or that should do.
>
> I've reached the stage, where I'm basically dumping the creole idea as 
> a waste of time because I keep posting comments on the wiki and get no 
> reply.
>
> ======
> Aim,
>
> my aim is to create a basic form of format that can be used across a 
> wide range of applications from wikis, to blogs, to message boards, to 
> private messages, to adverts for houses, to address lists for scouts.
>
> The applications have two things in commons:
>
> 1. They share the same username/password/authentication system
> 2. They share the same text interface.
>
> I'm not in principle against wizi-wig textual interfaces, except that 
> I regularly post on bulletin boards with such wizi-wig interfaces, and 
> I never use them, so they are a toupee to markup not hair transplant.
>
> =====
> Reason for writing,
>
> I reached that stage in the pistophonous curve where I wished I'd 
> never started this project because I can't write one bit of code 
> without finding that I've got a bug in another bit, and to be honest 
> the creole spec is light relief compared to debugging some of the 
> stuff I've written.
>
> And, I'm now so deep in the shit, and have so much newly written code 
> that I realise it's going to take months and months to test this 
> blasted thing .... and I may as well get into practice with blogging 
> because with no one else involved in the project, I'm going to be 
> talking to myself for months if not years at the current rate of 
> progress.
>
> Mike
>
> PS. 14,000 characters on my test case, and I'm still regularly finding 
> new problems and adding them to my test cases. (can a table have a 
> numbered list, why doesn't Firefox implement &shy;)
>
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