People are constantly wanting to improve and change the markup (TextFormattingRules) used by twiki. So much so that there is a gateway topic, TWikiSyntaxDiscuss, to find the various ideas brought forward. It would be a good idea to see what other communities are doing in this regard, so here we go. Items are in no particular order.

MarkdownSyntax

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

"Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.

Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like emphasis. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email."

reStructured Text

part of the Python Docutils project whose purpose is "... is to create a set of tools for processing plaintext documentation into useful formats, such as HTML, XML, and TeX." Being part of a larger project means there is code available (which would need to be converted to perl).

Much more comprehensive than TWiki.TextFormattingRules without sacrificing plain text readability. Handles headings (titles and subtitles) and numbered lists exceedingly well, meaning the plain text is just as readable as the rendered html, including multiple paragraphs within single list items.

There is not much overlap with TWiki's markup and more than a little in direct conflict (|vertical bars| as image markers for example), however given both the completeness and readability of reStructured Text it should be given a serious looking over.

See the restructured text quick reference for the actual ruleset (the main link above is the justifcation and commentary).

Textile

appears more thought out than most; has some overlap with twiki; some ideas are clearly simpler, others not

Texturizer

a little different from the rest, Texturizer focusses on creating typographic markup from plain text, in other words converting '--' to –, '---' to —, "straight quotes" to “curly quotes”, (c) to ©, 'etc...' to etc…

php source is at http://photomatt.net/tools/texturizesource - better grab it while you can, the main page indicates it will only be temporarily available. (14 Jan 2004 version is attached below)

texinfo

T_EX

Other Wiki Markups

• UseMod
• MoinMoin
• Kwiki
• Quicki
• Wikipedia

dokkenou

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Topic Contributors:
-- MattWilkie - 13,14 Jan 2004, ...

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Discussion on other sites on this subject

• http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiMarkupStandard
• http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikitext_standard
  • Also: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitax
  • Also: http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/ (Wikipedia's wiki software that handles 300,000 or so topics)
• http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Wikitext_standard
• http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/003758.html

• http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiStandards

Comments

Personally I think if a change to syntax was made, then it would be wise to follow a "standard" in terms of numbers of eyeballs. Currently wikipedia is "winning" (if that makes any conceptual sense at all) in terms of numbers of eyeballs, and as a result doing the thing that least suprises people coming from there makes sense. (That or harmonise with usemod and/or moinmoin - since they seem to be generally more popular IME than TWiki (heresy here, I know, but a random survey of the world wide wiki index site seems to suggest that))

-- MS - 14 Jan 2004

>(I really can't see why these [other wiki's] were forgotten... )

Not forgotten, just marked 'later'. I figure most people here have experience with at least one other wiki. My initial roundup focus is on 1) programs not part of the normal wikidom world, 2) markup conversion which is more than merely different. For example using ''' for italic while we use _ is not that interesting a difference. OTOH converting (c) to © (Texturizer) and underlined ALL-CAPS to headings (reStructured) is interesting and maybe worth adopting.

• I forgot to say: thanks for pitching in! and filling some of the holes. P) - 15 Jan 2004

-- MattWilkie - 14 Jan 2004

TeX math functionality is provided by MathModePlugin; TypographyPlugin has some TeX-like replacements (eg, -- for –, --- for — (which clashes with --- as an hrule, so i always use 4+ -'s)). not only would i like to see those kinds of replacements (and (c), (tm), standards-compliant curly quotes, etc.) it works "in theory," but its simple replacement algorithm wreaks havoc with embedded javascript, css, and comments... i've used TeX for more than 10 years, and i definitely miss some its typesetting features ( for those into that sort of thing ) --- especially ``smart quotes.''

on a semi-related note, some plugins would probably benefit from a non =%COMMAND{}% interface. eg, bug #123, hm, what else, don't have other specific examples at the moment. i'm sure there are others...

-- WillNorris - 16 Jan 2004

I'm working on porting Texturizer to a twiki plugin. So far things are going well as long as I skip processing double quotes (") (``smart quotes'' works!). I solved the --- as mdash and HR conflict by requiring space around it for mdash and beginning of line for HR. I started over rather than extending TypographyPlugin as it is too IE specific. Now if I can just figure out how to skip <(x)html attrib="value"> blocks I'll be laughing.

UPDATE: I've given up. I did get it mostly working, thanks to help from MS but it slowed everything down too much and the road ahead to a really usable plugin is longer than I care to travel.

-- MattWilkie - 16 Jan 2004

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Hey y'all. I've updated the MeatBall:WikiSyntax list with a view to move towards a MeatBall:WikiParserModel, and then a workable MeatBall:WikiInterchangeFormat (a MeatBall:WikiMarkupStandard is not a good idea). The TikiWiki guys are trying to put together an RFC for wiki markup for the IETF, so it looks like the pressure is on to finally do something. Please come over, add whatever you think is needed, like missing syntax, parser theory, algorithms, best practices, refactoring, etc.

-- SunirShah - 17 Mar 2004

added Markdown Syntax section; update note on my halted texturizer plugin project

-- MattWilkie - 12 Aug 2004

After following a lot of discussions on this matter, I started to write a translator between various formats. Feel free to comment.

http://wiki.fgranger.com/Development/MarkupToMarkup

-- FrancoisGranger - 01 Feb 2005