reST Wiki mode, was [Doc-SIG] Suggestions for reST "modes"

[Ken Manheimer]

Hi, all.  I've got some ideas about wiki and structured text i've been
meaning to put forward for a while, finally have a moment, and tony's
mention that gives me a great lead in...

On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, "Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)" <tony@lsl.co.uk> wrote:

> reStructuredText "modes"
> ========================
> [...]
> Wiki
> ----
> Allows any word of the form ``word_`` to be looked up in the document
> itself, and if it is not found, looks it up as a Wiki link word.
> 
> Thus one can create a WikiLink_, or indeed a wikilink_. One does not
> need the to !EscapeThings, because they're not links unless made so. One
> also doesn't need [this] because one can do this_.

Wiki name misfires are probably among the biggest sources of user
irritation i see - making their cues more explicit, as tony suggests,
is a real good idea.

Even with this explcit cue i would not want to then relax the wiki name
form, however.  Their constrained form (CamelCase, no whitespace or
punctuation, etc), is not just recognizable, if makes them more
recollectable, even reconstructable. Words and phrases in arbitrary form
don't have this virtue - there's many more ways to spell the same thing.  
Further, in systems like Zope where the page names are useful in URLs for
getting directly to the pages, "%20" for spaces and other punctuation
presents big, ugly obstacles.

In general, i'm interested in applying some of wiki's low-impedence
features for general use in the Zope content management framework.
I've got (languishing) some notes for a proposal along these lines -
see http://cmf.zope.org/Members/klm/ReducingImpedence .  I'd be
interested to know whether the syntax i'm considering there would
conflict with reST.

The short story:

  - WikiName unadorned is just regular text, not specially recognized.

  - [WikiName] is a wiki name - it must be camel case, no whitespace, etc.

  - [Any Old Phrase] or [word] or [Word], etc, are plain text, not
    specially recognized.

  - If you must, you can use doubled '[[...]]' braces to force
    arbitrary phrases to WikiName-hood.

I haven't gotten to learning reST, and am not sure whether square
braces already have some special significance.  I'd love to reserve
them for the purpose of wiki names ("common names"), since that's
sorta congruent to the way they're used in wikis (at least, ZWiki).

(I'm not sure if and how reST will be fit into Zope, but i'd certainly
like to keep that option open.)

Ken Manheimer
klm@zope.com