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?
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?
Then when no one was looking...
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}
Some Links
Thanks to
- Marc Laporte of EvoluData and Victor Emanouilov (marc or victor at tiki dot org)
- Moba Group
- And a mysterious third anonymous benefactor
Addendum
There were persistent calls for more pictures of cats, specifically Mr Wilson
https://mrwilson.cat/blogpost2-More-human-witchcraft