Re: Wiki?

On Apr 2, 2004, at 7:43 AM, Stefan Neufeind wrote:

On 1 Apr 2004 at 19:14, Paul M Jones wrote:

I get the impression from your recent mentions of wiki stuff (bug reports, RFC naming, etc) that you are working more with wikis than you used to. Are you using Text_Wiki for your work, or have you found something else you prefer? I ask because I'm interested in your appraisal of Text_Wiki, if that is in fact what you use.

Haven't yet played with a Wiki or even Text_Wiki in special. But as Paul mentioned I was also interested in how high-lighing can be done without a full-blown, Internet-Explorer-dependent HTML-editing solution. The markup of TWiki seems nice. Do you know how this is handled in other Wiki's? How about general markup-parsing-functions for some common languages? Would maybe be something similar to the BBCodeParser, but it might support a variety of dialects imho.

Every wiki engine does things its own way; this is why I wrote Text_Wiki (to help translate formatting rules). Here are the Twiki markup rules:

    http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/TextFormattingRules

Here is the Text_Wiki default markup rules sample page, and the formal list of all rules:

    http://wiki.ciaweb.net/yawiki/index.php?wiki=Text_Wiki&page=SamplePage
    http://wiki.ciaweb.net/yawiki/index.php?wiki=Text_Wiki&page=WikiRules

As you can see, the formats are similar, but different enough to cause confusion. For example, Twiki uses *bold* but Text_Wiki uses **bold** (and the original Ward Cunningham wiki used '''bold'''). To specify a described link to a wiki page, Twiki uses [[WikiPage][Described link text]], whereas Text_Wiki defaults to [WikiPage Described link text]. To mark a heading, Twiki uses ---++ for H2, ---+++ for H3, and so on; Text_Wiki just uses the plus signs (++ for H2, +++for H3, etc). These are just some of the differences. Now here is why Text_Wiki is useful: if you like, you can extend or replace the "bold" rule in Text_Wiki to use single stars (like Twiki) instead of double-stars (the Text_Wiki default) without changing any of the other markup rules. Same for the "wikilink" rule and the header rule, and all the rules in Text_Wiki. You can mix and match to develop a markup format that you like, and it will still render the same way. You could even write rules to interpret BBCode. (Looking for volunteers to help with that, by the way. ;-) If you want to play with the default implementation of Text_Wiki, try out the Yawiki sandbox:

    http://wiki.ciaweb.net/yawiki/index.php?wiki=Sandbox

-- Paul M. Jones pmjones@ciaweb.net Savant: the simple alternative to Smarty. http://phpsavant.com/