Eat My Business

How many varying wiki markup languages are there and what are the differences between them?

Some Questions

I want to add some wiki features to my site. I don’t need a whole wiki-system. Just really the rendering parts. So if i’m going down this route I need to get a few things understood to avoid re-inventing some wheels.

Ideally i’d be able to find a php wiki parsing engine that talks the same language as the one used in ‘Trac’. But does that parser parse wiki mark-up that has a name - I’m not sure at the moment?

First - Lets make a list of the various wiki formatting languages that i know of:

* Wikipedia (MediaWiki)
* Trac
Any others? Please comment. If you know.

So - of these,
* which formatting rules do they share,
* which rules conflict (i.e where the same mark-up leads to different results), and
* which rules are independently rendered (i.e where a rule has an effect in one language but is safely ignored by others )

Do they use in-house designed, bespoke, wiki formatting rules?

Or
Did they pick-up and use pre-existing wiki languages?
If so, can we name and list these languages?
Temporary working names of wiki languages

* mediawiki language
* tracwiki language

update ancestry of Trac (as far as i can tell):: ”creole wiki markup standard” -> moin moin wiki markup -> tracwiki

Any others? Do comment.

——-

Some Research-angles to follow up

I guess the first place to look is each language’s ”formatting pages”:
* mediawiki language
* tracwiki language

Also its worth searching to see if there are any ‘web standards’ relating to wiki mark-up, syntax and rendering.

aaah! i think that’s the golden research-angle / ‘keywords hook’ for my problem…
lots of stuff about this issue is getting written and talked about

* wikimarkupstandard
* google search for “wiki+standards”

* wiki standards discussion list

Having had a quick scan of the problems associated with a wiki-standard this comment stands out…and is probably the best comment on the wiki markup standard page…

Is the Tiki work Ryan refers to fairly well included in the material that has now accumulated here?

One aspect of a markup standard that appears to not yet have been considered is the specific intent of the use of the wiki technology. For example:

By recognizing that all wikis produce html and many can save that (rather than just displaying it) it becomes practical to use a wiki software’s editing and display functions separately, at different times, which reduces my concerns about the use of different markups. In effect, I can use a Personal wiki (that make it possible for me to choose my ‘personal markup’. As long as the Personal Wiki produces standard HTML (pretty well assured for any wiki that expects a Browser to do its presentation) than all that may be needed is an HTML2MyMarkUp conversion utility.
– HansWobbe

…so Personal Wiki
The idea of each person writing in their own wiki format seems great.
There are relatively few browsers out there - so i guess i can dream of

* user arrives at wiki-edit page
* html form input element signifies ‘wiki-input expected’ by use of an attribute
* a MyWikiConverter Browser Plugin sees attribute and checks if that wiki site is in its list of known wiki languages and feedsback this insight to the user - [YOU CAN USE YOUR OWN WIKI | YOU HAVE TO USE THEIR WIKI]
* user writes into the form , presses submit
* browser plugin attempts to detect content for wikilanguage signature
* [optionally prompts to aks if user wrote in thier own language or that of the wikisite]
* if user wrote in their own format - browser plugin siliently converts user formatting to wikisite’s formatting
* otherwise just submit like a normal http post/get
* it is likely that user sees preview

Requirements:
* user must train browser plugin to learn their prefered wiki language
* browser plugin must understand as many wiki languages as possible (however if it becomes widely adopted then wiki sites will HAVE to contribute to avoid being left behind)

Consequences:

50 zillion wikiconverter plugins get developed and all compete to demand the wikisite’s efforts and time

—-

ok having just scribbled those note… i did a search for “MyWikiConverter Browser Plugin” mywikicobnverter and this turned up>>>

Looks interesting - it seems to convert html to wiki dialects - although, after a quick scan of the page, i’m not sure how/who uses the it …
HTML::WikiConverter::Dialects

—-

and this seems to have some answer… http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor

——- anyway all this is academic - i’ve got to get on with my proper work.

UPDATE  18 MAY 2009

I was reading the comparison page for html purifier and it raised a good point about wiki markup. You have to  ask yourself why you want to use it. [see:http://htmlpurifier.org/comparison]

For me, I was looking for “a wiki parser that doesn’t get bogged down the with the rest of the wiki features”.

Why?

1. Scared of user input / XSS
2. Sick and tired of WYSIWYG editors breaking with new Broswer/Java Updates

So, maybe I just needed the Html Purifier library instead of a wiki engine. That would cause my issue 1 to evaporate.

Plus , there are Javascript WYSIWYG editors out there, so that might evaporate issue 2 .

• http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/ 
• http://www.fckeditor.net/

Problem solved.

——

Also that Html Purifier comparison introduced me to the concept of Markdown markup language, which i have never heard of before.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 8:22 pm and is filed under unanswered questions, web design, wiki engines, wiki syntax, wiki converter plugin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.