25 Nov
2015
25 Nov
'15
9:27 a.m.
Hi Guillaume,
On 25 Nov 2015 at 09:05:31, Guillaume Lerouge
(guillaume@xwiki.com(mailto:guillaume@xwiki.com)) wrote:
Hi Devs,
as you probably noticed it, Markdown has recently become somewhat of a
reference syntax for many developer tools, most notably GitHub. I have
recently discussed with teams using XWiki who are also using GitHub and
Slack and who are interested in being able to use Markdown syntax inside
XWiki.
Although it is already possible to use Markdown syntax in XWiki in a
limited way , I
don't think that a wiki could really work with only Markdown, due to the
following limitations:
1. We have invested a lot in the XWiki rendering and the XWiki 2.1
syntax in order to make them address a lot of use cases and work seamlessly
with the WYSIWYG editor
2. Conversely, Markdown syntax is very limited by design
and does not
support many of the important features of XWiki syntax, forcing users to
rely on HTML for a lot of use cases
What's interesting however is that Markdown syntax is very close to XWiki
syntax in a number of regards, notably line breaks, bold and lists. Some
notable differences include the syntax for links, images and code blocks.
My line of thinking is the following: what if we made it possible as an
option for users of XWiki 2.1 syntax to have XWiki interpret the main
elements of Markdown syntax? In practice, this would mean adding a set of
5-10 additional rules to the rendering engine.
The obvious benefit would be to improve adoption of XWiki by dev teams who
are already familiar with Markdown. I don't see any obvious drawbacks
(besides the need to code and maintain the feature of course), but I
clearly don't master all the subtleties of the XWiki rendering engine.
There are lots of differences between Markdown and XWiki Syntax, they’re completely
different actually (if I had to give a ratio I’d say 90% different). Also note that white
spaces have meanings in Markdown.
You should know that each syntax has a parser. We’re using the pegdown parser to parse
Markdown (we don’t do any work on our side on the parsing, we just adapt their events to
the XWiki Rendering Events). And for the XWiki Syntax parser they are javacc-based
parsers.
So theoretically it would be possible to implement a new XWiki Syntax altogether, although
very difficult (XWiki Markdown Syntax 1.0 for example), but there are many drawbacks. Just
to give 2:
1) It would be very very costly to develop and maintain (including having to develop a
renderer for it! Something we haven’t even done for markdown because of lack of
time/resource, so imagine having to code a new parser also).
2) It would confuse everyone: users knowing markdown and users knowing the xwiki syntax
since nobody would recognize their syntax.
Last I want to mention that markdown is no longer the hip syntax. It’s been asciidoc for a
while now. I’ve tried to integrate it several times but it’s missing a good java parser
right now (they’re working on it, albeit slowly),
see: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XRENDERING-323
Thanks for the idea though!
If we had some time to spend on this topic, I would spend it by implementing a Renderer
for the Markdown syntax so that users could use Markdown in the WYSIWYG editor. Just note
that this is quite complex to do and we would need to verify that we can express all HTML
constructions in markdown.
Thanks
-Vincent
Thanks,
Guillaume
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