Wiki : Java Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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Wiki

A way of collaboratively creating a website. Anyone can modify a page and make the changes available immediately. The Wiki keep a change history so the webmaster can quickly undo the work of vandals or incompetents. You use you web browser to edit the page. You don’t need FTP access or any special purpose editing tools. The downside is the markup language is primitive.

snipsnap wiki encodings
Wiki Encoding	Effect	Equivalent HTML
\	literal next character, e.g. [ is \[.	&
\\	line break	<br>
\\\\	literal \	\
__word__	bold	<b>word</b>
~~word~~	italic	<i>word</i>
1	heading	<h2>…</h2>
1.1	minor heading	<h3>…</h3>
1.	numbered list item	<li>
*	bulleted item	<li>
- -- ---	nested bulleted item, number of dashes indicates nesting depth.	<li>
[anyname]	local link	<a href="anyname.html">anyname</a>
{link:BouncyCastle\|http://www.bouncycastle.org}	remote link	<a href="http://www.bouncycastle.org">BouncyCastle</a>
{image:http://www.google.com/image/logo.gif}	insert image	<img src="http://www.google.com/image/logo.gif">
----	horizontal rule	<hr>

It has numbered and bulleted lists, but they won’t nest. You can do bold and italic. That’s about it. There is no search and replace in your editor. They foolishly used \\ as the <br> than also assigned \ as the escape character. I can’t see how you can make Wiki websites display a \. You must escape every use of [ ] because those characters are used to enclose local links.

The other downside is any idiot coming along can rapidly make a mess of everything. To help you sort it out, there is a diff feature to track the changes.

It is a great way to collaboratively put together a rough website of technical information where presentation is not important. The alternative would be to use CVS to modify the master HTML files, and have somebody upload the website periodically. One slick feature is it automatically creates backward index of pages that reference a given page at the bottom of the page, automatically creating a web of relations.

The markup language varies greatly between implementations. I am not impressed with the language designing skills. SnipSnap Wiki is as ugly as HTML and much more buggy. The -- command is often taken as strikethrough. The 1 feature often numbers incorrectly. It always fails on 11. The ~~ italic feature gets confused by nearby \\\\. Nesting does not work. If you delete a file, make sure you delete it first before you delete all the references to it, or you will not be able to access it to delete it.

CoWiki
CVS
FitNesse
Powerset: a search engine for the WikiPedia
SnipSnap Wiki Help
WikiPedia: a Wiki based encyclopedia

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