News

Yesterday we launched the stable Creole 0.5 and updated the Change Log. The next major change needed is to get to fix the Bold And Lists Ambiguity problem. Two potential solutions are the Hyphen List Markup Proposal and the Require Space After Bullet Proposal. We also created an Ambiguities page to help implementers find potential problems early. Your input is very much needed as we try to solve this last problem and bring us much closer to 1.0. Also, parts of Creole that are not considered core will be included as recommendations in Creole Additions.

I have contacted the staff that uses http://eduwiki.wmid.amu.edu.pl/ to teach on my university, and there is an opportunity to make an experiment with the wiki syntax.

We can have two groups of about 30 students each (first year of mathematics and first year of computer science) that will be using a wiki for learning -- mainly for communicating with the teachers and doing their home work. This system actually works since about 2 years and the results are pretty good, the students can operate the wiki easily after one introductory lesson.

Now, we can make them use a different wiki and we can skip the introductory lesson, if desired. The teacher can also require specific things if we want to test them. The experiment can take up to two months, starting with the start of new semester (end of February).

Now, how do we prepare TheStudentExperiment?

After a long and hard discussion on the Change Linebreak Markup Proposal, we have found in an informal vote for line breaks that wiki developers are 50-50 about whether to treat line breaks as line breaks (blog-style) or to ignore single line breaks (wiki-style). So, to keep from dividing the community, we have proposed a compromise where in this specific case, wiki developers can choose which they want to implement while recommending the blog-style variant. Discussion will be extended to 2007-Jan-31 to give people time to raise their opinions.

There is a lot of changes proposed for Creole 0.4, and some of them are interdependent. I will try and list them here, so that we can have a better picture. If I skip something, feel free to add it.

• treat "\n" in paragraphs as space, not as forced line breaks (ChangeLinebreakMarkupProposal);
• have a "forced line break" markup (which one? Talk.Linebreaks);
• start headings with single "=", not double (Talk.Headings);
• allow "}" at the end of nowiki and preformatted blocks (Talk.PreformattedAndNowiki);
• allow forced line break in table cells;
• require whitespace after a bullet in lists (RequireSpaceAfterBulletProposal);

Changes still discussed that seem too immature for 0.4, probably to be proposed for 0.5:

• quoting markup;
• table headings;
• multiline list items;
• indented block markup;
• escape character;

That's just my "impression" of where we stand, but I think it's important to know it. Now, do we just put it into a draft and discuss it as a whole? This version seems to bring a lot of pretty important changes.

Edit: Updated the list according to comments in Talk.News_blogentry_070107_1, added links to porposals and discussions.

Starting at 42:32 in Wikipedia Weekly: Episode 7, Creole is briefly mentioned.

Thank you for all of your help with Creole so far! We have just proposed added tables to Creole 0.3. According to our data at List Of Table Markups we see that most wikis use either single pipes | or double pipes || to separate table cells. So, we decided that it would be best to use a compromise between the two systems which is currently being used by Confluence and JSPWiki.

Header cells are separated by double pipes and ordinary cells by single pipes. The ending pipe(s) are optional. You can embed links, bold, italics, and monospace in table cells. We need a syntax for forced link breaks here.

||Heading Col 1 ||Heading Col 2||
|Cell 1.1       |Cell 1.2      |
|Cell 2.1       |Cell 2.2      |

We look forward to getting your input in the discussion. Discussion will continue until 15 Dec 2006. Please see Creole 0.3 for the official spec proposal.