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Hi,
Following a recent batch of format related requests, and while making some minor edits in the plugins page of the wikidPad wiki (
http://wikidpad.python-hosting.com/wiki/ListOfUserScripts), it occurred to me that a lot of these would be easily solved by conformance with whatever standards exist for wikis and wiki software. They can be (mostly) summed with four entries:
- CURIE, i.e., Compact URIs (
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-curie-20070307/), an emerging W3C standard which is still being drafted (s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURIE for info);
- Creole (
http://www.wikicreole.org/)a lightweight markup for formatting text, aimed at being a common syntax for wikis {s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_(markup) for info};
- txt2tags (
http://txt2tags.sourceforge.net/), a document generator that reads a text file with minimal markup (such as **bold** and //italic//) and converts it to a number of formats, including common markups (HTML & XML), Wikipedia, Dokuwiki, MoinMoin and Google Code wiki formats, as well as TeX, PageMaker and plain text (for an existing implemention of this into wiki software, check
http://wixi.sourceforge.net/);
- All of these are more or less related to the Interwiki idea(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interwiki), as exposed by the MoinMoin (
http://moinmo.in/InterWiki) & Meatball (
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?InterWiki)communities), but there seems to be a general consensus that this is one difficult and far reaching goal.
My point: what if the original Gadfly and original SQLite texts files generated by wikidPad were, for example, txt2tags compliant? It could be used as an extension gateway to accomplish almost anything with the data entered in a wikidPad wiki.
Compliance with Creole would guaranty that one could simply copy and paste wikidPad code into a lot of other online wikis, with obvious interoperability gains, and I think the appeal of CURIE is mostly self explanatory. While I am no coder, I feel these are sensible proposals that would maybe fit into wikidPad development.
Sorry for a longuish exposé, but I felt I couldn't let this idea pass by.
Happy festivities to all,
Midas