My term for any lite-markup approach to ASCII/Plain Text to add some structure/style.

• argh, shouldn't really use ASCII in name since it could be UTF. But UTF makes my head hurt, esp in terms of URI creation.

http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Why+Wiki+Syntax+is+Important

Possible contexts:

• comments in programming [Source Code] (both for reading within the programming editor, and for extraction into a pretty browser)

• writing/reading EMail

• WiKi, WebLog authoring

• authoring within Content Management System, or any Free Text Text Area in any WebApp (e.g. Sales Force Automation, CRM), and maybe even in Rich Client text fields.

• writing notes in a non-"standard" environment (e.g. on a PDA)

Examples:

• Structured Text, Structured Text Rules

• Re Structured Text

• SeText

• WikiWikiWeb:TextFormattingRules

• TextIle (orig and Mark Pilgrim's PyThon clone )

• see http://collab.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiText

I wish a standard (Wiki Standards) would converge on this, so you could learn one set of conventions for all areas. see MeatballWiki:WikiMarkupStandard.

• also see Textwiki translator code - does it work? http://ciaweb.net/free/textwiki.php

• counter-argument: The MeatballWiki:WikiSyntax is the User Interface, it is not the data encoding.

Why do this at all, vs a GUI (HTML) editor?

• in some contexts this wouldn't make sense (e.g. in programming [Source Code])

• in some environments it might not be available (e.g. on a PDA).

• "fancier" standards tend to change - you could just update your Smart Ascii renderer to re-generate HTML v2, HTML v4, XHTML, XML, PDF, etc.

Some areas to compare:

• tags for inline styles (e.g. bold, italic)

  • can you nest them (have an italic sentence with a bold word in the middle)?

• bullet points, ordered lists, etc.

• sections/headers

• hrefs

  • auto-linking [URLs] (accurately handling odd [URL] characters like percent, comma, amp, etc.)

  • making it possible to "hide" [URLs] behind a label like an href does

• image [URLs] turned into img tags?

• support for tables? (for tabular data, not fancy layout)

  • Wiki Pedia - http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_markup_tables

  • http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/TableMarkup

• escaping style tags

• also allow HTML in the document? Mix within the same line?

  • what about HTML form tags?

• things can get extra messy when you want to render Wiki Word cases within such a document.

User Options Recent Changes Help Page