A little bit about myself. I work as a software architect/lead developer for a large telecommunication company in Canada (my opinions expressed on this Web site are my own). I also have a broad experience with software usability.

I've been a very heavy user of wikis for the last 7 years mainly for internal projects - my team writes all of our software development documents in wikis (FlexWiki, MediaWiki, TWiki, TikiWiki, TRAC, XWiki, etc.). I'm also working really hard to install and implement wikis in my clients' organizations especially in their software development environments.

One of my goal is that humans use only one type of markups to write text quickly and efficiently for blogs, wikis, newsgroups, emails, readme files, ... The SGML family is great for structured or semi structured documents/data but it sucks when you have to write plain old text files with formatting by hand.

So, to give back to the community, I want to contribute a little to this wonderful effort.

If you want to contact me personally, you can write me at echartre at gmail dot com

What I like about Creole is that it could be the One Ring to Rule Them All (just kidding)! Seriously, with the broad support from wiki developers, it could be this spec that makes the unification possible in the long run. If we could get OLPC involved (CrossMark), it would be another great asset.

IMHO, the specification should not include any rendering i.e. (X)HTML suggestions. It should express the meaning of the markup accompanied by a very precise syntax.

My general position is to keep the standard as simple but as rich as possible for the user, two goals that are somewhat opposite, while minimizing the effect on existing WikiMLs. It should allow for a variety of writing styles so it can be accepted quickly.

I will express my opinion about NotNew in the next couple of days...

So, after reading all of the discussions and proposals, this is what I think:

Proposals (differences with Creole0.4)

1. Except in preformatted/No Wiki, a Tab, form feed or vertical feed is treated as a space
2. Except in preformatted/No Wiki, spaces at the beginning and at the end of a line are ignored
3. Except in preformatted/No Wiki, two or more consecutive spaces are treated as one space only
4. The different types of emphasis are dependent on the rendering
5. In Headings, allow for both = and ! (not mixed though), ! at the end are taken literally
6. In Headings, allow for parsing of character markups (see below)
7. In Headings, allow for spaces before and after the markup
8. In Headings, any number of = at the end of the line (with or without subsequent spaces) are ignored if the heading starts with =
9. For unordered lists, allow for both * and - (not mixed though)
10. In Quoting, allow for both """ and ::: (not mixed though)
11. For Horizontal lines, allow for any number of - equal or greater than 4
12. Table headings should be usable for row and column headings
13. In tables, spaces before or after the markups are ignored
14. All Paragraph markups except for Headings can be used in block markups (except in Preformatted where they are taken literally)
15. All Paragraph markups except for Heading and Block markups can be used in Table
16. New markup: Continue numbering in ordered lists (#^)
17. New element: Ordered headings
18. New element: Centered line

Markup categories

Character markups

Paragraph markups

Block markups

Table markups

Special objects markups

Extension markups