Hi all,
I work for Ross Mayfield at Socialtext (and also created Kwiki). Ross
asked me to comment on this thread.
I'm new to this list but i read through the thread. I would closely
align with Eric's thoughts below and have a few things to add...
Jimmy,
I think a combined approach is the most promising:
1) a single XML exchange format
This is the key. The key is to have a standard semantic model, and be
able to roundtrip documents in any given syntax through that model.
And it really has nothing to do with XML per se. It just so happens that
XML and XML/Schema (or DTD) is a well understood way to define such a
model.
You need to have a model before you can seriously think about moving to
a WYSIWYG option. The nice thing about plain text is that it is easy to
see when the underlying semantics are going south and to refactor. With
WYSIWYG the semantics of a document are very much hidden since the WYS
part is just the resultant presentation. The WYG part can become a
tangled mess. And that means you can't do anything interesting with the
page except look at it in your browser.
But once you have a model and you can validate that a page in any syntax
(including a WYSIWYG one) fits the standard semantic model (the one we
should be defining here) then you are all set. The syntax side becomes
nearly irrelevant, since you can flip between any of the compliant
dialects without losing any information.
I can imagine a new wave of wikis that allow each user to chose the
syntax that they edit documents in. And they can change to any other
syntax at anytime. How the data is actually stored is not important.
2) multiple wikitext standards based on families of
existing wiki
syntaxes sharing the largest similarities.
For example, several wikis use a "UseMod-like" syntax, and it would not
be very difficult to standardize within that group. It would be much
more difficult to get, say, both PhpWiki and MediaWiki to use a shared
syntax. The practical difficulties with switching an entire wiki engine
to a new syntax should not be underestimated.
Right.
If any wiki implementors are going to budge in regards to migrating
towards a standard syntax, there must be many choices at first. You'll be much
more inclined to budge towards something that is close to what you already
have.
Think about standarding the natural languages of the world. It will never
happen. The best you could hope for is combining similar ones.
Once we have these group standards sorted out, we
could try to merge
them further.
Right. And if users can select their own interoperable dialect then maybe
we'll just see folks migrating towards a best one rather than having it
mandated to them by some powers that be...
Cheers, Brian