Lonely Lion

Chris McAvoy likes kites

Wiki Markup.

with 7 comments

Could someone please decide on one syntax for wiki markup? Please? I’m tired of learning how to write a f’ing pre tag.

Written by Chris

April 18th, 2007 at 11:53 am

Posted in cranky

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  • http://push.cx Peter Harkins

    No kidding. When I was building the game wiki on NearbyGamers, I found libs for dozen markup languages laying around. I decided it would be too silly to pick one or invent my own, so I just went with HTML. It’s got a slightly steeper learning curve down at the “I just want to bold this” level, but there’s an infinite amount of documentation and a fair number of people already know it from GeoCities and LiveJournals and such.

  • chuck

    We have one — it’s called HTML. Or XHTML if you prefer. Writing a friendly front-end to that is a matter of user interface, and we all know there’s no one true interface. And yes, current interfaces like wikitext suck, and wysiwyg editors in browsers arent much better (for everyone who likes to put the hate on wysiwyg editors, why do you want italics, bold, monospace, bullet points, and tables at all then?)

    It makes me sad that we continue to invent such crummy interfaces and call them cutting edge. Look at Twitter for example, which seems to sport as a feature the inability to handle long messages. We’ll be banging rocks together soon and calling that new. It’s like some kind of crazy-ass reverse cargo cult.

  • http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles.shtml Fuzzyman

    Well said sir. :-)

    We should all stick to Rest…

  • http://python.net/~goodger David Goodger

    Many people have decided, just not collectively.

  • http://mikewatkins.ca/ Michael Watkins

    What about blog comment markup? ;-)

    Lets see, is it:

    @is this code?@

    or

    ::
    is this code?

    or

    is this code?

    or will xhtml work?

    is this code?

    or, possibly more likely, this blog doesn’t support pre and code in comments.

  • http://mikewatkins.ca/ Michael Watkins

    Hey, pre and code work. Long live xhtml.

  • chuck

    xhtml and wysiwyg editors FTW. Clunky wiki markup syntax needs to die. All the people who hate on wysiwyg don’t have much use for bold/italics/bullets/tables anyway, do they?

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