Wiki Interchange Format Examples

Place illustrative examples of WikiInterchangeFormat here. 

 <WIKIPAGE>
  <TITLE>FrontPage</TITLE>
  <ICON src="//www.heehaw.com/donkey.gif" />
  <WIKITEXT>
This is some text for this page.
<B>This is bold </B> <I>This is italic</I>
<INTERNAL_LINK src="//www.heehaw.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?ThisLinkIsInternalToThisWiki?">
ThisLinkIsInternalToThisWiki?
</INTERNAL_LINK>
<UL>
<LI>Here is a list item</LI>
<LI>Another...</LI>
</UL>
Here is a numbered link.
<NUMBERED_LINK src="//www.heehaw.com" number=1 />
  </WIKITEXT>
  <EMAIL_SUBSCRIBERS>
<EMAIL_ADDRESS addr="junior@heehaw.com" />
<EMAIL_ADDRESS addr="archie@heehaw.com" />
  </EMAIL_SUBSCRIBERS>
 </WIKIPAGE>
No, I don't really know XML. I think this is well-formed, but not necessarily well-conceived. The URLs in the example are munged to prevent confusion. -- TimVoght

Why would you want to interchange the subscribers to a certain page? -- LaurensPit

Ok, here's my go of it. 

 <wikipage id="WikiInterchangeFormatExamples">
    <head src="http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki">
       <subscriber email="junior@heehaw.com" />
       <subscriber email="archie@heehaw.com" />
    </head>
    <body>
       <p>This is some text for this page.</p>
       <p><b>This is bold </b> <b>This is italic</b></p>
       <hr />
       <p>XML is cool, check out <link>XmlNeeded?</link></p>
       <p />
       <p>List</p>
       <ul><li>Item 1</li><li>Item 2</li></ul>
    </body>
 </wikipage>
Whitespace is evil and should be avoided at all costs. There are three possible children for body, <p><hr /><ul> and <hr /> is not a container. The empty <p /> not ideal, but something like it is probably inevitable.

The <link> tag is technically not required, but would help a parser. Note that the head/@src attribute can aid in resolution. If the link can be located internally, good, otherwise the parser would have the option to link outside.

Uppercase tags are valid XML, but I personally don't like them.

I would love to see the option of entering data plain text parsed or XML tagged. Of course, the tagged version would have to checked for syntax, but it would be much cleaner. Also, the ability to format entries would be expanded.

I don't believe an HTML tag set is ideal, but a custom subset would have obvious advantages. -- JoeYoung

The wiki I created is based on XML, though this was not done with the intention to interchange with other wikis (but rather to separate logic instructions from presentation elements) the possibility of interchanging was kept in mind. To view the XML data simply slap &xml=1 behind any page you see on OpenWiki. For example: http://www.openwiki.com/ow.asp?p=OpenWiki&xml=1 -- LaurensPit

Just to be clear, personally I don't see any reason for wanting to interchange wiki data.... what's wrong with simply hyperlinking? Greatness is in diversity. -- LaurensPit

Hyperlinking has limitations. I can see investing a lot of time in cool navigation features for your particular engine, but then you want to surf content from other wikis with the same cool interface. Having a WikiInterchangeFormat could help there. I don't mind writing my own formatting plugin for the other wiki language, though. All I want from the other wiki is the raw data file and a list of which words in the page are links on the foreign wiki.

I might then scan the raw data from the other wiki to see if any words are linkable to my own pages. That would be cool; I'd be able to make synapse links from two totally different wikis in the same page.

-- SteveHowell

I am new to Wiki, and I stumbled on the lack of uniformity. From the little that I have seen, markup conventions vary wildly among servers. I am considering adopting a WikiEngine as a way to:

The problem is that I cannot easily move content to another WikiEngine, meaning that I must choose the "right" server to begin with. And I do not believe that I can choose.

For my personal data, I am old enough at this game to know that my old useful data typically outlives the computers, applications, and operating systems used to create the data. Before I store any personal data on a WikiEngine, I really want to know how to get it out.

For Storing data, I will probably want to integrate the WikiEngine with other text forms such as an HTML version of the "official" documentation. This means that I will probably end up writing a WikiEngine, modifying a WikiEngine, or writing some clever "add-on server" that integrates with the wiki. Which means that if I deploy a WikiEngine with one server now, I will probably move to another server later on. That's not a problem... unless the users/authors have to relearn all the rules!

Also, coming from the Macintosh camp, I could easily see the birth of a shareware MacWikiEditor (for example, requiring tabs in text kills some possible authors). However, consider the problem: either the said browser must learn the formating conventions of all the WikiEngines, or you need some (probably extensible) standard. XML seems perfect for this.

-- JoaquimBaptista

CategoryWiki

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