The Relentless March of Markdown

Introduction

• By Jonny Bradley at FOSDEM 2023
        
  Front end developer with Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware

My Personal History with Text Markup Syntaxes

In the olden days...

• BBcode
• MediaWiki
• Tiki Wiki
• Textile
• Probably others... and then
• Markdown
  (should i explain what Markdown is?)

Who can remember all these syntaxes?

Imagine if there was only one?

• There can be only one...
  
  

Previous Moves Towards Standardisation

• Wiki Creole
  Creole is a common wiki markup language to be used across different wikis
  • Tiki Wiki (got as far as the wish list)
  • XWiki (experimental)
  • TiddlyWiki (no relation)
  • DokuWiki
  • MoinMoin
  • and various others
• PHP PEAR Text Wiki classes
  Transforms Wiki and BBCode markup into XHTML, LaTeX or plain text markup
  • Text_Wiki_BBCode
  • Text_Wiki_Cowiki
  • Text_Wiki_Creole
  • Text_Wiki_Doku
  • Text_Wiki_Mediawiki
  • Text_Wiki_Tiki
    Used in the MediaWiki-Importer

We Have To Include This Right?

• The obligatory XKCD cartoon
  
  Thanks to xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/

Then when no one was looking...

• Here comes Markdown!
  
  
  
  

A Brief History of Markdown

• 2004 Created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz
• Divergence and duplication
• 2012/2014 CommonMark by Jeff Atwood, John MacFarlane and others
  • ( Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International)
• 2020 GitHub Flavored Markdown

Widespread adoption

• Including:
  • GitLab
  • Stack Overflow
  • Reddit
  • Matrix
  • Nextcloud
  • Discord
  • Bugzilla
  • and even Microsoft Teams , WhatsApp and Facebook !

Markdown in Tiki

• Markdown arrived in Tiki 25.0
• Markdown should become the default markup in Tiki 26 (maybe 27)
• Tiki wiki syntax should become legacy and read only in Tiki 27 (or maybe 28)
• We use Tiki Flavored Markdown
  Of course we have a flavour because...
  • CommonMark is deliberately simple - for instance, no way of centring text
    
  • Tiki uses "wiki plugins" to extend functionality e.g. {CENTER()}Some centred text{CENTER}
    

• WYSIWYG
  • Tiki has previously used CKEditor customised to use Tiki wiki markup
  • We adopted Toast UI Editor for Markdown WYSIWYG
    
    
    
    
    https://ui.toast.com/tui-editor

Some Links

• More info here https://doc.tiki.org/Tiki-Flavored-Markdown
• Other new features in Tiki 25 here https://doc.tiki.org/tiki25
• Demo https://demo.tiki.org/25x/
• https://tiki.org/TikiFestFosdem2023

Thanks to

• Marc Laporte of EvoluData and Victor Emanouilov (marc or victor at tiki dot org)
• Moba Group
• And a mysterious third anonymous benefactor

• by jonny@tiki.org
  
  
  
  
           

Addendum

There were persistent calls for more pictures of cats, specifically Mr Wilson

https://mrwilson.cat/blogpost2-More-human-witchcraft