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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

I was with him until he recommended one based on Wiki markup. Wiki markup is pretty universally reviled for good reasons.

He right complained about the heavyweight notation required for a simple link in Markdown, but everything is that bad or worse in most Wiki markup.

Really, the complexity of the markup you need depends on your application and any attempt to make a "one size fits all" markup is going to fail. The needs of a simple commenting system are vastly different from a user-editable CMS that doesn't want to give access to full HTML, but wants robust formatting options.

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I am really happy to see this article. I was just talking to a friend about how much I dislike Markdown and how it has become the de facto markup.

Can you explain to me why wiki markup is universally reviled?

I find Creole to be great text markup. It feels really natural to use and it expresses the intended meaning whether it's rendered using HTML or displayed in plain text. I really like this statement by Christoph Sauer on the Creole website: http://wikicreole.org/wiki/ChristophSauer

I agree that Creole or any other formatting markup is not going to solve everyone's problems. However, I think that whenever Markdown is a good choice, Creole is a better one.

That statement is nothing special, both Markdown and asciidoc claim to be a formalisation of the plain text conventions you already use. IMHO most of the alternatives mentioned in this comment thread understand their goals and the design space well enough, and many are definitive improvements over Creole's MediaWiki-inspired, committee-designed syntax. They also win in featurefulness (Markdown and Textile have html embedding, asciidoc and ReST have extension mechanisms), which is important for a wiki.

For me, the reason is that Creole (and formats like it), feels like markup. Writing Markdown feels like writing text.

I was used to most of the conventions from Markdown mostly as-is from writing plain text for a couple of decades before I first saw Markdown.

Whenever I come across Creole-style formats, I cringe - it means I need to think about the markup instead of think about just writing.

Markdown is basically another flavor of wiki markup. It just happens to be the most popular iteration at the moment.

I'm not sure how you can say wiki markup is universally reviled without lumping markdown into that statement. You must have a particular flavor of wiki markup in mind.

Wiki markup is recognisable with link conventions [[like this internal link]] and [[like this|http://external/link]] (MediaWiki and Creole; earlier wikis relied solely on CamlCase). Markdown's design is inspired by conventions used in plain-text email, with links [like this][1].

[1] http://site/

> Markdown's design is inspired by conventions used in plain-text email, with links [like this][1].

And [title](http://url.goes.here) for in-line URLs.

Of course. Either way, it's close to the plain text convention, though one wouldn't bracket the link-name part.

That is not how I write plain-text email, and I don't think most people do either.

I write links in plain-text emails as: www.example.com/awesome-video-of-kittens.jsp?referrer=whatever

Note in particular that I don't put http in front, nor do I provide an alternative title.

I don't get it, do you type the URLs by hand, or do you manually cut the http:// from what the browser gives you? Both options seem odd to me.

I didn't notice the browser ads the http.

Anyway it should still understand links without http because if I am typing the link out by hand (say because it is a site I remember) then I would still want it to be a link.

> I didn't notice the browser ads the http.

This is baffling for me. You are not new to the Internet, but until only quite recently, every single browser always showed the protocol is the address bar. Only of late did Google Chrome and then e.g. Mobile Safari remove “http://” from the display to save space; and yes, naturally they include this string when copy-pasting as doing otherwise would result in an incompletely pasted URI (protocols are not optional, except by current convention in non-hypertextual media).

> Markdown is basically another flavor of wiki markup.

One clear advantage of markdown is that its markup is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible to the point that its text/plain rendering is its own source. That's clearly not the case of MediaWiki or even Textile.

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