[Phpwiki-talk] Re: Wiki RFC Discussion

[Reini U. <ru...@x-...>]

electron schrieb:
> This seems fine by me, a standard could benefit everyone well. Below are my
> thoughts:

> Section 3 XML Schema:
> 
> Here the RFC should include the schema for Wiki XML files. Content between
> Wikis should be easily movable and dumps/revisions should have a standard
> schema.

Standard for whom? There is no common wiki standard yet. If people will 
decide on a standard one could switch from engine to engine, and only 
the wiki's with the best features will survive. That's far too liberal 
for me. Most new engines nowadays only survive because of their "weird" 
new syntax and their usebase hooked to that, and not because of their 
features. I don't like concentration that much.

> PhpWiki uses 3 different methods for database dumps. Ugly. Hopefully the
> goal will be a dump from phpwiki could be imported with ease to another
> wiki.

Not ugly. We have to support the old schema's also.
The new MIME-ified syntax is the easiest, best and most general for us.

XML is pure hype with no substance and generally overkill for such 
simple data as wiki formated text, which is just plaintext like =pod 
with headers.
We have no loops, and almost no recursive structures in wikitext.
Only our new blockformatter is moderately recursive, but other wikis are 
not that clever, so it's generally not mapable.

Personally I prefer to do the translation on purpose in one of my 
favorite languages (lisp or perl or php) with a couple of lines, such as 
MoinMoin => PhpWiki, but if someone ever will come up with a unified 
wiki schema, we might have to think of supporting this new out- and 
input format also. Hopefully its no XML.
This RFC format for example looks fine for such an intermediate format, 
because it's easy to read and easy to write. As any Wiki syntax, in 
contrast to XML as we all know.
That's the whole reason why we use wiki or pod, and not HTML or troff.

> I intend to write a schema if none exists but not for a month or two.
> Requires digging into more than one of my XML books. :)

Please do so :)  I'd like to see such a thing in existance.
-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/