Tim Starling wrote:
Unfortunately one type of wheel doesn't fit every
car. XML is designed
to be primarily machine-readable and unambiguous, human-readability and
ease of authorship is a secondary consideration. I once read an article
by Tim Berners-Lee (?), saying among other things that users ultimately
should not see XML except in exceptional circumstances, and that
automated tools will be created to author it.
Wiki markup, on the other hand, is primarily designed to be easy to
create and easy to read. Concerns such as the ease of parser design and
avoiding ambiguity are decidedly secondary.
I agree with this completely. Now, obviously we should be very
careful about falling into any "reinventing the wheel" syndromes, or
any "not invented here" syndromes, etc. But wiki markup serves a very
different function from HTML or XML.
--Jimbo