I'm sympathetic to your view in favor of siplicity. > I'm normally someone who's attracted to ideas like writing in a markup language instead of raw HTML and h

I'm sympathetic to your view in favor of siplicity. > I'm normally someone who's attracted to ideas like writing in a markup language instead of raw HTML and having some kind of templated, dynamic system (whether it's a wiki, a CMS, or a themed static site generator), as you can tell from Wandering Thoughts and DWiki itself. Note that HTML is a markup language (an SGML application) and so is XHTML (an XML application). If you meant by "a markup language" a user-friendly or domain-specific markup language, then there is good news: if you use XML as your markup (ideally by defining your own wiki's DTD, as simple or as sophisticated as you like) then you can associate an XLST transform "program" with it, and then a click on "view HTML" in the browser will display the underlying XML [sic], not as you would expect the generated XHTML, as the XHTML is generated from the XML on the fly only (not stored persistently anywhere, thus avoiding file clutter). For example, you may like a structure like: <docs> ... <doc> <title>...</title> <text>...</text> <keywords>...</keywords> </doc> ... </docs> The XSLT can insert the standard XHTML boilerplate as well as your logo and a header after the <doc> and before the <title> element, for instance, and any potential footer between </text> and </docs>. That gives you much in terms of separation between structure and content, yet no separate conversion pass is required to render the pages in a standard browser, and no special viewer plug-ins are required either.