Michel Fortin

[Rad Geek]

Late response, I know; my e-mail pile is slowly decreasing in height...

On Wed,  1 Dec 2004 17:28:47 -0500, John Gruber <gruber at fedora.net> wrote:

> Aaron Swartz <aaronsw at gmail.com> wrote on 12/01/04 at 1:26pm:
>
>> > looking at adapting it for use with Mediawiki.
>>
>> I was thinking of doing this as well...
>
> My question regarding using Markdown as a filter for wikis is
> whether there needs to be any sort of support at the syntax level
> for wiki-specific features, such as the way wikis (always? usually?)
> cross-link within the wiki to anything written in CamelCase.

Well, this depends on the Wiki, I'm sure. MediaWiki, for one, doesn't use  
CamelCase; it just uses `[[free links]]`. (It was mainly because that  
seems like a natural analog to links with `[null references][]` in  
Markdown that I proposed making the behavior on a null reference  
implementation-defined in the syntax, and trying to hand it off to an  
external handler in Markdown.pl / markdown.php / etc. a while back.) In  
any case, if switching to Markdown makes it harder for Wikis that aren't  
specifically dealing with code to use CamelCase linking, I'd say that's a  
feature, not a bug. ;)

Of course, one other way to do the Wiki-specific stuff is just to build  
any syntax needed for the Wiki environment into a second filter that is  
run either before or after Markdown.pl. Particluarly if they insist on  
doing stuff like CamelCase that's completely off the Markdown radar. Any  
Wiki system that is going into a high-stress environment is already going  
to need some hefty caching options already, so I doubt the performance hit  
 from two layers of filtering would be a big deal.

-RG

-- 
Charles Johnson <technophilia at radgeek.com>
AIM: AiPuch
WWW: http://www.radgeek.com/

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