Creole (markup)

Creole is a lightweight markup language for formatting wikitext, aimed at being a common markup language for wikis, enabling and simplifying the transfer of content between different wiki engines.

Originally conceived during a workshop at the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis, the goal of Creole development is to "create a common markup that was not a standardization of an arbitrary existing markup, but rather a new markup language that was created out of the common elements of all existing engines."^[1][2] To achieve this, different existing variations on wiki markup were analyzed and the most commonly used elements included into the specification. An EBNF grammar and XML interchange format for Creole have also been published.^[3][4] Creole was specified by comparing major wiki engines and deciding on the most common choice for a particular wikitext element. If no commonality was found, the wikitext of the dominant wiki engine MediaWiki usually was chosen.

On July 4th 2007, Version 1.0 (final) of Creole was released, and a two-year development freeze was implemented to allow time for authors of wiki engines to adopt the new markup. Although development to the standard itself is frozen, discussion in the developer community regarding good practices in wiki markup design and about possible additions and changes for future Creole versions continues.

Creole syntax examples

Emphasized text:

//emphasized// (e.g., italics)

**strongly emphasized** (e.g., bold)

Lists:

* Bullet list
* Second item
** Sub item

# Numbered list
# Second item
## Sub item

Links:

Link to [[wikipage]]
[[link_address|link text]]

Headings: (closing equals signs are optional)

= Extra-large heading
== Large heading
=== Medium heading
==== Small heading

Linebreaks:

Force\\linebreak

Horizontal Line:

----

Images:

{{Image.jpg|title}}

Tables:

|= |= table |= header |
| a | table | row |
| b | table | row |

No markup:

{{{
This text will //not// be **formatted**.
}}}

Support in engines

As of early 2011, wiki engines that have implemented full or partial support for Creole include Oddmuse, MoinMoin, DokuWiki, TiddlyWiki, JSPWiki, PmWiki, PodWiki, XWiki.^[5], EuWiki, Ikiwiki, Hatta and PhpWiki.

However, Creole is not necessarily the default syntax in these wiki engines.

References

1. ^ Chuck Smith. "Wiki Creole Press Release". wikicreole.org. http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/WikiCreolePressRelease. Retrieved 30 November 2008. 
2. ^ Sauer, Christoph; Chuck Smith, Tomas Benz (2007). "Wiki Creole: A Common Markup". Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis. ACM Press. pp. 131–142. http://www.wikisym.org/ws2007/_publish/Sauer_WikiSym2007_WikiCreole.pdf. Retrieved 2008-11-30. 
3. ^ Martin Junghans; Dirk Riehle, Rama Gurram, Matthias Kaiser, Mario Lopes, Umit Yalcinalp (2007). "An EBNF grammar for Wiki Creole 1.0" (pdf). ACM SIGWEB Newsletter (Association for Computing Machinery) 2007 (Winter): 4. doi:10.1145/1324960.1324964. ISSN 931-1745. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1324964. Retrieved 2008-11-30. 
4. ^ Martin Junghans; Dirk Riehle, Umit Yalcinalp (2007). "An XML interchange format for Wiki Creole 1.0" (pdf). ACM SIGWEB Newsletter (Association for Computing Machinery) 2007 (Winter): 4. doi:10.1145/1324960.1324964. ISSN 931-1745. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1324965. Retrieved 2008-11-30. 
5. ^ "WikiCreole: Engines". Wiki Creole. http://wikicreole.org/wiki/Engines. Retrieved 2008-12-01. 

External links

• Creole 1.0 Homepage
• Creole 2.0 Discussion Homepage
• WikiSym 2006 Workshop: Wiki Markup Standard
• Demonstration of a downloadable JavaScript-powered editing tool for Creole 1.0