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Why are we even talking about wiki markup in the year 2013? I'm including all the variants, including markdown and creole and MediaWiki syntax. Wiki markup exi

by neilk 14y ago

Why are we even talking about wiki markup in the year 2013? I'm including all the variants, including markdown and creole and MediaWiki syntax. Wiki markup exists to bridge the gap between textareas and fully formatted pages. It was a great idea in 2001-2004 or so. We have decent HTML editors now. Wiki markup makes it difficult for non-geeks to contribute. Wiki markup is non-WYSIWYG, slowing every edit down with some 'parse' or 'compile' cycle. At some point you will have to allow raw HTML and JavaScript to be embedded within it, and then you have the various nightmares that ensue from context-dependent errors in parsing, output, or even security. There are a few benefits that markup provides over a decent HTML editor - certain changes can be more semantic, and it's easier to diff. As for semantic changes, I would suggest making up your own tags and attributes, as HTML has always allowed, and expanding them as needed to the desired target formats. As for diffs, this is harder, but some focused attention to the problem could solve it. And diffs have their own usability issues anyway; they are barely readable for computer languages. We probably need a better paradigm for tracking changes to human-readable documents.

xentronium 14y ago
HTML is good for layout, but bad for formatting. Markdown et al. are good for formatting, but useless for layout. WYSIWYG-giness is not a part of the problem, you can have WYSIWYG editor for markdown. > At some point you will have to allow raw HTML and JavaScript to be embedded within it {{citation needed}} > There are a few benefits that markup provides over a decent HTML editor - certain changes can be more semantic, and it's easier to diff You forget about indexing and sending plaintext emails. You'll have to do something about soup of tags surrounding a typical WYSIWYG-generated html. Besides, you don't need to think about sanitization and malicious inputs: markdown output tends to be mostly harmless. You'll have to disable inline html and custom element classes, though, otherwise it might break your page layout.

by neilk 14y ago

xentronium 14y ago

HTML is good for layout, but bad for formatting. Markdown et al. are good for formatting, but useless for layout. WYSIWYG-giness is not a part of the problem, you can have WYSIWYG editor for markdown. > At some point you will have to allow raw HTML and JavaScript to be embedded within it {{citation needed}} > There are a few benefits that markup provides over a decent HTML editor - certain changes can be more semantic, and it's easier to diff You forget about indexing and sending plaintext emails. You'll have to do something about soup of tags surrounding a typical WYSIWYG-generated html. Besides, you don't need to think about sanitization and malicious inputs: markdown output tends to be mostly harmless. You'll have to disable inline html and custom element classes, though, otherwise it might break your page layout.