The Relentless March of Markdown

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

My Personal History with Text Markup Syntaxes

• BBcode
• MediaWiki
• Tiki Wiki
• Textile
• Probably others... then
• Markdown

Who can remember all these syntaxes?

Imagine if there was only one?

Previous moves towards standardisation

• Wiki Creole
  • Tiki Wiki (got as far as the wish list)
  • XWiki (experimental)

• PHP PEAR Text Wiki classes
  • Text_Wiki_BBCode
  • Text_Wiki_Cowiki
  • Text_Wiki_Creole
  • Text_Wiki_Doku
  • Text_Wiki_Mediawiki
  • Text_Wiki_Tiki

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 CommonMark by Jeff Atwood, John MacFarlane and others
• 2020 GitHub Flavored Markdown

Widespread adoption

Including:

• GitLab
• Stack Overflow
• Matrix,
• Nextcloud
• Discord, Bugzilla

and even Microsoft Teams and Facebook!

Markdown in Tiki

Limitations

• CommonMark is deliberately simple
• Tiki uses "plugins" to extend functionality

WYSIWYG

• Tiki adopted Toast UI Editor for Markdown WYSIWYG
  https://ui.toast.com/tui-editor

Conclusion and Thanks

• More 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/

Thanks to

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

By jonny at tiki.org