XML syntax
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Why would you output XML
[edit]The Wikitax aims at being as simple as possible to write. But if you want to reuse text of or for the Wikipedia you need to write a filter for each format. As far as I know the Wiki system only provides a conversion from Wikitax to HTML.
If there is an XML syntax for Wikitax and a convertion between both of them then:
- You "only" need to write an XSLT filter to import/export other formats.
- A PDF view of articles (with FO)
- Editing articles in OpenOffice
- A Wikipedia Client using OpenOffice as GUI? (Wikitax may be simple but people prefer WYSIWYG!)
- How about a wysiwyg editor that doesn't take over a minute to load? ;)
Note: See http://wiki.auf-trag.de/ for an experimental python script that converts wiki articles to LaTeX or PDF-- Stw
Other side effects/benefits include
[edit]- There is also a concrete draft for a Wikipedia DTD, and a proposal for doing DocBook XML exports.
- What about PDF, TEI, DocBook, OpenOffice, RTF etc.?
- You could use another wiki syntax to write articles for wikipedia. Some people might like to write *foo* or <b>foo</b> or '''foo''' but it's all the same, isn't it?
- There is a discussion on a c2:WikiInterchangeFormat (an open and standard data format for sharing wiki pages) that may be XML. A group of us (representing MediaWiki, TWiki, and PurpleWiki) gathered at Wikimania on August 4, 2005 to discuss ways of pushing forward on a Wiki Interchange Format.
Portability
[edit]There will probably never be one XML format for all wikis. For the Wikipedia project we should define a format that is convertable to Wikitax and vice versa. every other converting tasks may work on top of this.