I want to make new TextFormattingRules for my very own ServletBasedWiki.
Here are my thoughts on the goals:
I've identified the following items as needing to be addressed by my rules:
Block level
Sometimes you really do need a table. There are several WikiClones around (including Ward's own QuickiWiki) that can do nice WikiTables without resorting to HTML. -- RogerBrowne
I like them done with pipes such as:
It must be non-ambiguous - I desperately want to avoid the SixSingleQuotes phenomenon.
See QwikWiki's BackTick? for a possible alternative. Not claiming it's Great; just an idea. (Kindof a kludge that seemed acceptable.) -- BillKelly
StructuredText uses double-pipes, and I used that notation for MoinMoin. Another precondition I used is that a line with table markup has to start and end with a table cell marker (||). Pretty non-ambiguous. -- JuergenHermann
Until you want to put some C code into a table cell, for example...
How about an XmlBasedWiki? (Just kidding.) -- AnonymousDonor Sure, if you can give me a client-side XML editor flowing with WikiZen.
Write a parser module for MoinMoin that takes XML input. :) -- JuergenHermann
Have you considered TextileFormat (http://bradchoate.com/tools/mtmanual_textile.html)? I use it for my weblogs and it seems to handle basic formatting quite well, is reasonably intuitive (especially for old USENET types), does tables and free links. The only missing functionality is definition lists, which I notice the lack of as well. There's a newer version in the works with things like footnotes and more powerful paragraph and table formatting.
InstikiWiki (www.instiki.org) is a WikiClone that uses Textile (by default - alternatives are Markdown and RDoc) for its markup language. While not without its flaws, I far prefer it to any other Wiki markup so far. Instiki is so powerful and easy to run locally to boot, so it's a good all-round package.
Bullets and numbered list to essentially work as-is but ignore leading spaces (yes, this would mean giving up sub-lists).
EddiesWiki solves this without giving up sublists: <space>*<space> begins a bulleted list. Additional spaces before the asterisk make sublevels. This is darn intuitive, I think.
I prefer using the * without a preceding space for the first level and ** for the second level, etc.