I apologyze, I sent an empty reply. :-(
Just a brief comment: there's no need of seaching for "a perfect wiki
syntax", since it exists: it's the present model of well formed markup, t.i.
xml.
While digging into subtler troubles from wiki syntax, t.i. difficulties in
parsing it by scripts or understanding fuzzy behavior of the code, I always
find a trouble coming from tha simple fact, that wiki is a markup that isn't
intrinsecally well formed - it doen't respect the simple, basic rules of a
well formed syntax: strict and evident rules about beginning-ending of a
modifier; no mixing of attributes and content inside its "tags", t.i.
templates.
In part, wiki markup can be hacked to take a step forward; I'm using more
and more "well formed templates", splitted into two parts, a "starting
template" and an "ending template". Just a banal example: it.source users
are encouraged to use {{Centrato!l=20em}}.... text ...</div> syntax, where
text - as you see - is outside the template, while the usual
syntax {{Centrato|.... text ... |l=20em}} mixes tags and contents (Centrato
is Italian name of "center" and l attribute states the width of centered
div). I find such a trick extremely useful when parsind text, since - as
follows by the use of a well-formed marckup - I can retrieve the whole text
simply removing any template code and any html tag; an impossible task using
the common "not well formed" syntax, where nothing tells about the nature
of parameters: they only can be classified by "human understanding" of the
template code.... or by the whole body of wiki parser.
Alex