There seems to be a small variety of formatting rules in the various wiki's on the web. What should we use? ---- [Bryan] likes the fact that references in the Tcl'ers Wiki uses square brackets (eg: [[TclWiki Formatting Rules]]) Should we consider allowing raw HTML? This would require a special escape character. I stole this idea from a wiki used by AT&T -- they said they use a vertical bar at the start of a line to say it is raw HTML. Is there really a need? [Bryan] thinks the clumping of single quotes for emphasis is annoying, but since other wiki's use it, we should probably stick with it. Though it makes me wonder why the original wiki didn't use the more common *emphasis* or _emphasis_. [Larry Virden] says that Bryan's idea reminds him of setext - a format very common in the Mac world. Seems like some ideas could be stolen from there to make even better formatting options. [Bryan] would also like to be able to have nested bulleted lists. The markup could be a bastardization of the current bullet scheme and the current emphasis scheme (ie: clumping of characters). For example (using . instead of * so it won't be rendered as a bullet in the example): . a level one bullet .. a level two bullet ... a level three bullet That seems fairly trivial to implement. ---- JC: well, I gotta admit that I too like the square brackets, but that's probably obvious... :o) As for raw HTML, I would vote 'no' for the mix-in approach. We have XML coming up for content (with XSL taking care of style, graphically speaking), and XHTML trying to consolidate it all. With mixed style, it's gonna be a helluva tricky business to make this work long term. And documents (unlike styles) are often about long term information. Bryan adds... now that I think about it, raw HTML is probably bad for another reason -- it makes it difficult to render in Tk without having a full blown HTML widget. In fact, I might even vote 'no' for HTML - for the simple reason that we already have a mechanism for that: good 'ol static pages, served as "*.html" files. There is some inconvenience in mixing the two, but it's in fact what I'm considering to do with my own site: part of it as HTML pages, and part of it in a Wiki, with hyperlinks between them. Maybe even a hyperlink to a dedicated wiki page on each HTML page? That would make an instant annotation system... [Larry Virden] wonders aloud ... perhaps a titling notation, where if a title ends in .htm, the file is treated as a static page (sort of like the .tcl titles are treated). Of course, there should be a way in the package to turn that on and off. ---- [JCW] Bulleted lists: yes, please. They are not in Wikit / the Tcl'ers Wiki merely because of my lazinyess and lack of time. The approach I have seen is that the level of indentation defines: . * this is 1 . * this is 1.1 . * this is 1.2 . * this is 2 . * this is 3 (I've prepended a dot just to make this wiki ignore the formatting) ---- I've been very divided too on the subjects of linking and allowing HTML. We are now using a WikiWikiWeb to document projects, internal systems, and keep contact information up to date. But recently a sysadmin asked for the ability to add HTML, because he wanted to use tables. The idea of starting all lines of HTML with a bar is an interesting one; I thought about creating a logical block instead, like: ##################
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