!!!Original Possible Goals (Wikisym 06)

The following goals were formulated at the [Wikisym 06]. Every participant then had three votes to determine which were the most important to them for discussion. Goals that had more than four votes are in bold. These were then used as the key goals around which the later discussions were formulated: if we got stuck when trying to make a decision, we'd look at the goals again and see which of our choices matched mostly closely to the 4 top goals. 

Markup should be:
* __Collision Free__ (Principle of least conflict), 7 votes
* __Cover the common things people need__, 6 votes
* __Extensible by omission __ (Don't specify things), 5 votes
* __Not new__ (Principle of least innovation), 5 votes

* Fast to type, 3 votes
* Clear separation of markup & content, 3 votes
* Less principles than markup, 3 votes

* Readable, 2 votes
* Easy to learn/teach, 2 votes
* Non-destructive on current page structure (editing does not remove elements), 2 votes
* Stable for the next three years, 2 votes

* Avoiding Text Tags (principle of I18N), 1 vote
* Avoiding difficult Key Combos (Principle of Foreign Keyboards), 1 vote
* Distinction between images and pages, 1 vote
* There's no wrong way to implement creole, 1 vote

* Have a sort of best practices (links that don't exist?)
* Not reliant on whitespaces
* Not html (or xml)
* Well defined whitespace

44 votes -> (assuming that one vote is missing:45/3 = 15 people voted) [see poster pictures|http://www.flickr.com/photos/19766212@N00/tags/creole/]


!!! More Possible Goals, Ideas, Principles
These where __not__ formulated at wikisym 06, still it might be interesting to hear new ideas, so feel free to add yours here...
* different characters for different actions where possible -> e.g. do not use the same for bold and lists
* number of characters fixed for elements with fixed size -> always two {{{ [[x]], **x**, //x//, {{x}} }}}
* start with one character for elements, adding more chars changes size or indentation {{{ =h1, ==h2, *e1, **e1.1 }}}
* also think of non-techies (the grandma rule)
* the rule of least surprise -- allow to guess the effect by just looking at the markup, don't make it dependant on external info, like page existence or whether page is image or text
* have style and avoid ugly markup