Pre-Proposal: Text_Wiki

Hi, everyone, This is a pre-proposal for a package to be called (tentatively) Text_Wiki. The purpose of Text_Wiki would be to parse text from a user-definable set of Wiki markup rules to any other target format, notably HTML but eventually RTF, PDF, Latex, and so on. Before I get started on the package in earnest, I'd like to find out what the level of interest is in this kind of thing, and whether there's something I have missed (so as to avoid the Text_TSV mess I got myself into a few days ago ;-).

    http://c2.com/cgi/wiki
    http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TextFormattingRules

I've always been interested in the Wiki formatting style, especially for non-technical users. I like the idea of being able to parse Wiki-style markup wherever and whenever. However, I have consistently run into two problems when looking for a Wiki parsing engine.

    Problem 1:  there is not a standard set of Wiki markup rules.  Sure,
    there is the original Wiki rule set, but it has been enhanced and
    extended (and ignored) by different Wiki implementations.

    Problem 2:  every parsing mechanism I have found is embedded in a
    larger Wiki application and very thoroughly integrated into that app.

These two problems, taken together, make it very difficult to plug a Wiki parser into your own application, especially since you may not need to support authoring, editing, versioning, page tracking, macros, and so on. Therefore, I'd like to propose Text_Wiki, a package that (similar to Config) allows you to define different source markup rulesets for Wiki text, converts that source to an internal standard, then sends the converted source to an output engine that renders into any number of target formats. The first target format would be HTML, but once the source Wiki markup is converted, there's no reason why it could not be converted to a PDF or to Latex. The guys over at WikkiTikkiTavi have a great GPLed Wiki application in PHP that already does most of this (conversion, output, etc). The parsing and display are relatively loosely integrated with the app, and look to be extensible in a meaningful way.

    http://tavi.sourceforge.net/

If there's a positive response from the list, I'll talk to the Tavi guys and see if they'd be amenable to letting me abstract and port that subsection of their code to PEAR. (I don't want to start a "fork war" so it might be best to wait on their kind permission.) Any comments? -- pmj