markdown parsing

[almereyda]

parse the wiki also against markdown.
this is highly recommended as writing markup is immersive.

wiki's already taking profit of it at the project wiki on github, so why not have a real markdown'ish wiki?

could also streamline questions like

• Feature Candidate: Allow external links with no description. Default to URL. e.g. WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki#314
• create a simple Bullet List plugin so we need less html WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki#218
• WYSIWYG Formatting, Mass Accessibility WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki#251
• ...

and if we want that or not : pure markdown already has a very limited feature set.
parsing could also work like:

• headings - #, ##, ..., ###### - shortcut for pagefold
• bulletlists - shortcut for LF /
  workarounds
• links - external w/ easily comprehensible description + http://... / www. auto-parsing
• ...

[paul90]

this is highly recommended as writing markup is immersive.

maybe for you it is. I personally find markdown highly disruptive - having been exposed to many different forms of mark-up, often with particular mark-up having quite different effects.

In my experience non-technical users find markdown arcane, and avoid using it. The end result being content will no mark-up.

[almereyda]

In my experience non-technical users find markdown arcane, and avoid using it. The end result being content will no mark-up.

You have a point here. Nevertheless, maybe it can become some kind of plugin. I'll look into this in the future.

[WardCunningham]

I would like to explore specifying a markdown plugin that selectively implements section heading and paragraph level formatting. I see this as one of several alternatives to the cross-site scripting vulnerabilities we have by allowing html in paragraphs. (Another alternative would be an "html" plugin that supported limited html using tag syntax.) Let me consider here some design criteria we might want for a "wiki flavored markdown".

It should make a single story item. Whatever one writes into the normal text editor would become a single item with respect to drag and drop. For example, a bullet list with five items would be five items that would stay together when drug from page to page. One could, however, make five separate markdown items, one for each bullet. Then it would take five drags to move them to a new page.

It should accept the [[ ... ]] link notation for wiki links and match paragraph semantics for these. It could replace [ ... ] links with a traditional markdown solution for links. @almereyda suggests including github style issue linking. I could imagine hacking the plugin's implementation to include site-specific semantics but have trouble seeing how this could be done in a more general way. This would be a "wiki issues flavored" markdown which would render without those advanced features if forked into a site with the standard plugin.

It could facilitate pasting large blocks of markdown from other sites by creating multiple story items at once when this happens. Sections separated by blank lines could become separate items. Indented code blocks could become items of type == code so as to benefit from the formatting applied there. (I think we can detect when a paste happens.)

It should be described in an About Markdown Plugin page using simple examples. One could make a heading of the desired size by dragging an example from the about page. If markdown offers several ways to do something then we might choose only one so as to keep the explanations short. We should favor site-specific extensibility over complete implementation of some other flavor of markdown.

It should showcase federated wiki's polyglot philosophy of many simple markups working together. In doing so it should satisfy most programmer's needs to write something with a bit of familiar markup.

[paul90]

Would make sense to look at some convergence with other mark-up. For another wiki mark-up using MarkDown as a starting point, it might be worth looking at TiddlyWiki's WikiText. Some items of mark-up will rendered by plug-ins, code being a good example.

There will be those who don't find things like markdown simply get in the way of creative though, where something more like writing in Medium would be more natural.

[almereyda]

I totally subscribe to the idea on how Medium handles formatting. Because many people will never want to know what MarkDown actually is (about). That I admit.

You might also want to risk a look at Stackedit 4, which evolved from a mere MarkDown editor into a text publishing tool with a very functional interface.

[almereyda]

While scrolling through some W3 IRC logs, accidentally I just found wikiLingo. You should check the Demo, it's quite powerful.

[almereyda]

I have been thinking about the factory during the last days. Why would I want Markdown enabled by default, when it is possible to have a factory plugin?

I see a fair chance that I can try to integrate something like Pen, grande.js or Zenpen to provide a plugin, once the community initiative goes live.

I just read that Mike was a little quicker with this idea.

[WardCunningham]

We now have a markdown plugin so I'll be closing this issue.
fedwiki/wiki#28

[almereyda]

Merci beaucoup!

On 20 December 2014 at 06:09, Ward Cunningham notifications@github.com
wrote:

We now have a markdown plugin so I'll be closing this issue.
fedwiki/wiki#28 fedwiki/wiki#28

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#7 (comment).