general Wiki format question and Python Wiki markup parsing libraries

[chris]

hi,
i am looking for a way to structure the text in XML comments to produce
a XHTML doc format for the XMLs (in this case XSLT).
so is was thinking about using a wiki like text format. e.g. something like
<!--
!Headline

some __bold__ text in a paragraph

* a list
* another item

etc... (the markup used is only an example!)

-->

but it should be a widely used format that people do not need to learn
yet another syntax.
it will be used by people using XSLT so it should not be language (py,
perl, java, ...) specific.

is there something like a "standard" wiki format at all, or at least one
that is widely used?
in my company we use a jspwiki which e.g. uses !, !! and !!! for
headlines, __bold__ and * list markup (like the example above). is this
more or less a standard as this is the only wiki i've used yet?
i was googling for python libraries which would parse a wiki text format
to xhtml but could not find something really useful.

is there a python library to parse these text formats? i was looking a
bit into reStructuredText but was wondering if this is generally used or
maybe is too Python specific.

any hint would be great
thanks
chris

[Jarek Zgoda]

chris <cs***@yahoo.com> pisze:

is there something like a "standard" wiki format at all, or at least one
that is widely used?

Don't think so. I saw more than 10 "simplified markups", of which nearly
all was more complicated than original HTML. I wanted something like
this in my JPA, so I added possibility to use Mark Pilgrim's Python
implementation of Dean Allen's Textile (originally implemented in PHP,
Perl version also exists), but Textile is really "simplified", its
capabilities are rather limited. Go to http://diveintomark.org/ and
check if PyTextile will suit your needs.

--
Jarek Zgoda
http://jpa.berlios.de/

[chris]

Jarek Zgoda wrote:

chris <cs***@yahoo.com> pisze:

is there something like a "standard" wiki format at all, or at least one
that is widely used?

Don't think so. I saw more than 10 "simplified markups", of which nearly
all was more complicated than original HTML. I wanted something like
this in my JPA, so I added possibility to use Mark Pilgrim's Python
implementation of Dean Allen's Textile (originally implemented in PHP,
Perl version also exists), but Textile is really "simplified", its
capabilities are rather limited. Go to http://diveintomark.org/ and
check if PyTextile will suit your needs.

thanks for the hint. PyTextile is almost too much already and i agree
almost as "complex" as HTML. something simpler like a wiki syntax would
be much better...

chris

[John Roth]

"Jarek Zgoda" <jz****@gazeta.usun.pl> wrote in message
news:c8**********@nemesis.news.tpi.pl...

chris <cs***@yahoo.com> pisze:

is there something like a "standard" wiki format at all, or at least one
that is widely used?
Don't think so. I saw more than 10 "simplified markups", of which nearly
all was more complicated than original HTML.

Well, I think the "simplified" seems to be a tradeoff in
terms of fewer keystrokes, rather than any conceptual
simplicity. If you really want to simplify things, please come
up with a little WISIWIG editor rather than yet more
line noise.

John Roth
--
Jarek Zgoda
http://jpa.berlios.de/

[chris]

John Roth wrote:

"Jarek Zgoda" <jz****@gazeta.usun.pl> wrote in message
news:c8**********@nemesis.news.tpi.pl...

chris <cs***@yahoo.com> pisze:

is there something like a "standard" wiki format at all, or at least one
that is widely used?

Don't think so. I saw more than 10 "simplified markups", of which nearly
all was more complicated than original HTML.

Well, I think the "simplified" seems to be a tradeoff in
terms of fewer keystrokes, rather than any conceptual
simplicity. If you really want to simplify things, please come
up with a little WISIWIG editor rather than yet more
line noise.

John Roth

--
Jarek Zgoda
http://jpa.berlios.de/

well, i think it is not fewer keystrokes but to be able to easily read
the text (like here in this email without the html tag noise in e.g.
javadoc) when working on the xml/xsl file but at the same time to be
able to generate a structured xhtml documentation from the same text.
so something like restructured text seems like the best option to me for
now.

chris