launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

["Cody A.W. Somerville" <cody.somerville@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Tom Berger <tom.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> 2009/9/16 Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> > On Sep 16, 2009, at 12:33 PM, Karl Fogel wrote:
> >
> >> I think your comfort with reST syntax is interfering with your ability
> >> to see the inherent editor-unfriendliness of having a two syntaxes in
> >> the same wiki :-).
> >
> > I can see that a wiki gardener's job will be harder if s/he has to learn
> two
> > syntaxes, but it should be plainly obvious when looking at the raw text
> of a
> > page which format is being used.  The first line of all rest pages will
> be
> >
> > #FORMAT rst
> >
> > Now here's another interesting question that this leads to.  If/when we
> ever
> > get something like wikis in Launchpad, what format(s) are we going to
> > support?  I hope to Guido we won't perpetuate the madness which is moin.
> ;)
>
> Moin, and I'm not sure it's so mad. Moin is more popular (among wiki
> users) than ReST and in many cases it is closer to the syntax of other
> wikis than ReST. There are some things I like better about its syntax
> too. Headers are much nicer to read and write in moin, for example.
>

+1.Whats wrong with the moin syntax? Besides being more similiar to other
wiki syntaxs like Tom mentions, I've often found moin has has a pretty
intutive syntax and doesn't require "html syntax" as much unlike mediawiki.

ReST actually looks really confusing. Doesn't it use grave accents for some
things? I imagine that'll really confuse folks who don't normally use that
key and confuse it for the apostrophe. Plus I don't like how it makes you
type *more* to do the same things, ex:

 1. Titles: They have to be underlined (or overlined AND underlined) with a
printing nonalphanumeric 7-bit ASCII character ( recommended choices are "=
- ` : ' " ~ ^ _ * + # < >") and the underline/overline must be atleast as
long as the title text. So besides needing to get a table of all the
different 7-bit ASCII characters so I can see if something is a title or
not, my fingers are going to hurt from all the extra typing.

 2. Hyperlinks:  Wow. Talk about confusing.  There are direct, indirect,
internal, embedded, anonymous, and implicit hyperlinks. They all involve an
underscore (or two) and probably some grave accents.

Python_ is `my favourite programming language`__.
>
> .. _Python: http://www.python.org/
>
> __ Python_
>
The above produces this: Python <http://www.python.org/> is my favourite
programming language <http://www.python.org/>.

Apparently, the second link is both an indirect hyperlink target and an
anonymous hyperlink target. The double underscore would be your anonymous
hyperlink *reference*. I guess we learn something new everyday, eh?

3. Tables: Besides the only difference between a table header and a title
using '=' or '-' is a space, if a vertical bar is used in the text of a cell
that lines up with the column boundaries, it'll interpret it as the boundry
of the cell. wait... you have to line up the table boundaries? I want to
write a wikipage, not compose ASCII art.

Anyhow, I can see how ReST is good for somethings (like when you place high
value on the readability of the markup, ex. doctests) but I can't see it
working for a high traffic wiki. With ReST being so technical and elaborate,
you'd be going around all day fixing the formatting breakage caused by other
people who aren't familiar.

Cheers,

-- 
Cody A.W. Somerville
Software Systems Release Engineer
Foundations Team
Custom Engineering Solutions Group
Canonical OEM Services
Phone: +1-781-850-2087
Cell: +1-506-471-8402
Email: cody.somerville@xxxxxxxxxxxxx