27 Nov
2015
27 Nov
'15
1:06 p.m.
Hello all,
Caleb thus wrote:
I would say generally speaking the longer we wait to
align our syntax
with markdown the more non-standard and irrelvant our syntax will become.
This is
pretty harsh. Do you know if others are doing such a slow
convergence?
I think Markdown is great for elementary tasks such as a readme but I've
seen it fail for bigger (and long term) things.
If we were building XWiki from scratch today, we would
be royal fools not
to adhere to what is essentially a universal standard for syntax.
Erm... provided
it would do all we wish it to do.
E.g. I've never seen "macros" in markdown be put to use in widespread
infrastructures whereas many wiki syntaxes have some (GitHub has none as
far as I can tell).
Addressing that point might answer Guillaume's original intent, which
seems to answer a fairly precise desire. In particular, I'd be quite
fine if we enriched our MarkDown processor with some forms of macros but
nothing more of the xwiki syntax.
I've always seen markdown as "when it's simple I use it" otherwise,
just
don't bother and use html.
Guillaume, should that be broken? I'd understand yes, but please confirm.
Also, how would you have recognition? E.g. how should the table syntax
be recognized?
paul
But even though we're not building it today, many
people are trying it
today and for someone who doesn't know or care about the bad old days
before markup was standardized, we're just another incompatible format
with no significant market share.
Same story is true for Bootstrap. 5 years ago there was no coherent
standard, now there is.
tl;dr it sucks but we have to.
Thanks,
Caleb
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Guillaume Lerouge <mailto:guillaume@xwiki.com>
25 novembre 2015 09:05
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 <http://rendering.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Markdown11>, 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
<https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax> 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.
Thanks,
Guillaume
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