Authors: Martin Junghans, Dirk Riehle, Rama Gurram, Matthias Kaiser, Mário Lopes, Umit Yalcinalp
Abstract: Today’s wiki engines are not interoperable. The rendering engine is tied to the processing tools which are tied to the wiki editors. This is an unfortunate consequence of the lack of rigorously specified standards. This paper discusses an EBNF-based grammar for Wiki Creole 1.0, a community standard for wiki markup, and demonstrates its benefits. Wiki Creole is being specified using prose, so our grammar revealed several categories of ambiguities, showing the value of a more formal approach to wiki markup specification. The formalization of Wiki Creole using a grammar shows performance problems that today’s regular-expression-based wiki parsers might face when scaling up. We present an implementation of a wiki markup parser and demonstrate our test cases for validating Wiki Creole parsers. We view the work presented in this paper as an important step towards decoupling wiki rendering engines from processing tools and from editing tools by means of a precise and complete wiki markup specification. This decoupling layer will then allow innovation on these different parts to proceed independently and as is expected at a faster pace than before.
Reference: In Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Wikis (WikiSym ‘08). ACM Press, 2008. Forthcoming.
Available as a PDF file.
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1 Bookmarks about Markup // Oct 4, 2008 at 11:51
[...] – bookmarked by 3 members originally found by Kairi13578 on 2008-09-19 A Grammar for Standardized Wiki Markup http://www.riehle.org/2008/07/19/a-grammar-for-standardized-wiki-markup/ – bookmarked by 3 members [...]
2 2009 Year-end Summary and Review // Dec 17, 2009 at 13:46
[...] hire is Hannes Dohrn, a recent graduate of our university. Dohrn is focussed on taking our vision for wiki technology to the next level. Members two and three will be working on the next generation of open [...]
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