• Smart Ascii

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

• Wi Ki, Web Log authoring

• authoring within Content Management System, or any Free Text Text Area in any Web App (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

• Se Text

• WikiWikiWeb:TextFormattingRules

• Text Ile (orig and Mark Pilgrim's Py Thon 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 WikiMarkupStandard.

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

• counter-argument: The 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 SmartAscii 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.

evaluating alternatives

Aug'2007: considering choice to use with Ro Baccia

• currently using Piki Piki, not fan of the lots-of-single-quotes model

• Structured Text: already in my Wiki Log

  • annoyed by italics getting broken by pasted-in non-low-ascii chars (like curly quotes) - but that may be code issue, not spec issue
  • don't like single-quote breaking italics, since pasted-in text often uses them
  • don't like single-square-brackets having meaning, since they are often used as normal punctuation

• Re Structured Text?

  • sublists need 2 spaces per level

  • ugh, the hyperlinks syntax is horrible, having to move them to a separate line

  • I'd still consider it if there was an existing converter for Structured Text, but I haven't seen one.

• Wiki Creole: not supported much yet

  • Oct'2009 update: it has more support now (e.g. in Pin Ax/Django Wikiapp, and Moin Moin), so looking at it

    • not bad in general
    • hmm can't have double-linebreaks between sublist items (though seem to be ok between level-1 bullets)

• Text Ile: poor performance

• Mark Down: blech I hate the syntax