On Sat, 2009-11-28 at 09:10 -0500, D. Richard Hipp wrote: > http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/wiki_rules
I re-read this and noticed again the rationale for using the simple wiki rules included instead of an existing wiki language. Given the rationale, I think Markdown would be a better choice. > 1. There is no standard wiki markup language. Every wiki engine does > it a little differently. There are only a small handful of popular wiki languages. Some implementations may have more or less features (e.g., Markdown implementations in various languages), but in the case of Markdown at least there is a common core with a test suite which nearly all implementations pass. Fossil itself is an example of looking at an already-crowded field and deciding to start over a bit differently anyway, and I'm glad of it: I find fossil easy to understand, and publishing repositories together with documentation and issue tracking is shockingly easy. But surely having many existing options is not in itself a reason to start over? Unlike fossil as a whole vs other SCMs, the wiki formatting provides no advantages at all vs markdown, at least from a user perspective. > 2. The wiki markup used by fossil, though limited, is common to most > other wiki engines, is intuitive, and is sufficient for 90% of all > formatting tasks. SVN was sufficient for 90%+ of my SCM tasks until I learned about the power of easy branching and merging and distributed development from git and the power of built-in collaboration tools and trivial publishing from fossil. For composing text, though, I'm already used to the power and flexibility of markdown, and fossil wiki doesn't meet 90% of my needs--anymore than I'd still be content with SVN. > 3. Where the fossil wiki markup language is insufficient, HTML is > used. ... HTML does not need to be used very often so is not a burden. > The formatting rules for fossil wiki are designed to be simple and > intuitive. ... with a safe subset of HTML for more complex formatting > tasks. This is what it really comes down to, isn't it? The formatting should be simple and familiar, and it should be easy easy easy to fall back to HTML for whatever you need. Until this evening I hadn't deeply investigated the other wiki formats. I was surprised to discover that it's not trivial to just use HTML in any of them! That being the case, perhaps you weren't aware that using HTML *is* trivial with markdown? You can freely mix plain HTML in with the markdown formatting without any special escaping. So for the same feature set, markdown is at least as intuitive as fossil wiki, it provides convenient and intuitive formatting for a larger set of text composition needs, and using HTML is just as easy in markdown as in fossil wiki. I see two ties and one win for markdown. Consider also that with markdown the wiki formatting would not be *similar* to most other wiki engines, it would *be* one of the two most popular text formatting engines. Markdown is a very well thought-out format by a guy who spends a lot of time focused on writing, HTML, and writing-with-and-about-HTML. I'm pretty sure if John Gruber (creator of markdown) needed an embedded database, he'd just use SQLite and never even consider writing his own. With all respect to one of my programming role models, I think DRH--needing a convenient, HTML-compatible wiki format--should just use Markdown: the one very popular already-existing format that supports painless inline HTML. --------------------------------- >From a user perspective, I think markdown is a clear win. But I don't know much about the implementation. The 'discount' library Michael Richter linked earlier is released under a permissive license, but it's one that may not be compatible with GPL 2. I've written the author to see if he would consider one of the definitely-GPL-compatible permissive licenses, but I don't know him at all and have no idea if I'll even hear anything back. If markdown integration or implementation (as necessary) isn't worth the trouble right now, I hope you'll at least move it from a "wontfix" to "patches accepted". -- Joshua Paine LetterBlock: Web applications built with joy http://letterblock.com/ 301-576-1920 _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
