Hello, I'm Johnny Bradley, I work on the Tiki project.
As a developer and have done for about 20 years I think, but I'm not going to do the
usual, this is the new stuff in Tiki 25 talk because there's a lot of it and I
thought I would concentrate on something more collaborative. So this is about
markdown, I'm assuming everyone knows what markdown is and uses it, if not we
can work it out afterwards. Yeah, it's a microphone but only for online people.
Yeah, sorry, I'll try and project. In the old days we had BB code starting off
which was like HTML with square brackets and the media wiki obviously
everywhere, then I found Tiki, had its own syntax, it uses little quote marks
instead of asterisks, that kind of thing and each time you change to a different
platform you have to look up in the cheat sheet, how do I do underline, is it
underscores, is it asterisks, whatever. And more and more in the last few years
we've been finding markdown has appeared more and more, mainly from
GitHub and GitLab and the best thing would be if there was just one, one
syntax to rule them all. In the very olden days, early noughties, there was a
project called wiki Creole which Tiki wiki was nearly involved with, we
didn't implement it, but next wiki I believe did. Tiddly wiki, which I
always liked the name, Doki wiki, lots of other friends and yeah but the project
stalled, it didn't quite make it. I think apparently because media wiki just had
too much stuff that they couldn't migrate to a different syntax so it'll
ground to a halt. There was about the same time, there was the PHP pair classes
which you could do an interchange with yeah wiki Creole to media wiki to Tiki,
we still use that even though it's not supported anymore. Oh yeah, so we need
another standard, Jean-Marc insisted that I should put this cartoon in, wasn't in
the original script, so let's have one more standard. Here comes markdown and
this was the reason for the title of this this talk is I just had this idea of
markdown taking over the world a bit like Godzilla destroying a city. Markdown
was started in 2004, it was basically a Pearl script I believe and over the
years more and more people implemented different versions of it and it became a
bunch of different standards. So then common mark project was initiated about
10 years ago and that seemed to be the best of breed, it's a creative commons
definition of how it should work with a test suite and basically that seems to
be the standard adopted by most people but obviously it doesn't do everything
so many people extended it mainly Github, so Github flavored markdown seems to be
the generic standard for most places and that is now used by Github, GitLab, Stack
Overflow, People Without Logos, Nextcloud we just heard were there early on,
Discord icon broken, bugzilla and now even the proprietary softwares like Facebook
and WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and so on are using it and so we thought Tiki
should use it as well. So in Tiki 25 we've adopted markdown we've always had
our own syntax so that carries on working and now its default is off but you
can enable it and it's a little bit alpha that's improving and the next
release hopefully it would become the default syntax and then at some point in
the future Tiki syntax will become read only and will be markdown like the rest
of the world we assume and of course we need our own flavor of it. One thing
was a little surprise to me that you can't do centered text in markdown that
is outside of the scope of it but all our clients will want to do centered text
so we use misleadingly in Tiki these are called plugins but you don't have to
plug them in they're just in there they're more like WordPress short codes
I guess so yeah you want to center something you want to do it in a box
formatting tools and user lists and so on I think there's about 250 plugins in
Tiki which will carry on working but in markdown scope. We also use CKEditor
for our existing WYSIWYG offering and we decided to review that partly because
the licensing changes of CKEditor 5 or 6 is it seems to be a little more
challenging and so we went for ToastUE which is a native markdown WYSIWYG
and seems very promising again 25.0 it's a little alpha but does the job
that's about it I'm really under time aren't I so yeah you can find out more
about our markdown there Tiki 25 which I could go on to we have a lot of new
stuff in there you can play with it on demo.tiki.org and a recap of
everything on our wiki page I just wanted to say thanks to Mark Laport who
was a Tiki leader for a long time and is still looking after us and
he's sort of spearheaded this this initiative Victor who did a lot of the
back-encoding Mova group who initiated the whole thing because they wanted
better WYSIWYG and some mysterious third anonymous benefactor that's about it
and are there any questions?
so Mark Laport said that you are most welcome and we have I believe 16 minutes for questions
16 minutes yeah I should have done more slides yes I was just wondering can you
translate from one Tiki supported language into markdown itself yes yeah
we have yeah so the question was can we can we convert from Tiki markdown into
markdown Tiki syntax into markdown and back again yes we can the more you do
it the more the page will go weird because there are some things that are
supported in different ways in the different languages but yeah each wiki
page has a little cog icon you get a little dialogue saying do you want it in
WYSIWYG or plain editor and you want it in Tiki or markdown syntax and it's
surprising we weren't expecting that for Tiki 25 we're quite pleased that's
working already again that will improve yes sir I looked at common mark
specification and basically black sphinx which I used from P markdown extra like
tables definition list is there any current markdown which implements those yes
github flavoured markdown sorry yeah repeat question repeat question so
specifically you're asking about tables and other features whether those are
supported in markdown they're not in the core common mark specification but github
github flavoured markdown adds tables and a bunch of other things there's some
things that github do like references to other commits and pull requests and so on
we don't use and again Tiki flavoured markdown has a plugin system so there's
another 250 so you can do search results you can build quite complicated
applications we're still working out what's missing so I guess we'll get
feedback over the next few months as to what people want to do and still can't
yes first one remark if people are interested we have a converter in xwiki rendering supports many many syntaxes and is able to convert from one to another including from html so if you can convert something to html it could actually convert to any of the syntaxes that xwiki rendering supports including markdown, common markdown, github flavoured markdown, and many other like wiki etc.
and I have a question on the did you have problem for the WYSIWYG with the allowance to do inline html in markdown to make WYSIWYG go back and forth to come back to the markdown syntax?
yes in the alpha sorry yeah do we have a problem converting from one syntax to the other where you get little stray bits of html creeping into the wiki markup which
we obviously sanitize afterwards and I think we've nailed all those yes there were some challenges with that in the alpha stages and I kept on finding that a bold markdown tag would then suddenly appear as little html bold tags
part of that I think is toast use does some of that again it's the initial release and it's still marked as experimental so yeah I found I don't know yeah I found toast community to be a little bit sort of read only
I haven't found much of a chat if anyone knows where to talk to the toast developers better than I would like to do that and I did the toast implementation but yes it's something we're watching out for
yes show them up
yeah the question was is there gonna be a common mark version 2 I don't know anyone else got any ideas
it seems to be is designed to be very complete and it's designed to be very simple so possibly not
so we have to wait and see as an aside I found out the midi you know the music interface system that is still version 1.0 and that started in the 80s so maybe it doesn't need upgrading
hello
depends which language you're writing it in
oh yeah are there any tools tools and libraries you're asking if to convert mark down to html yes there's a lot we're using the PHP league common mark because we're PHP application
which does most of the mark down to html conversion and I believe the html back to mark down because again we go via html when we're doing conversion process
which language are you in they're bound to be surely I don't know the python world that well so I'm guessing there'd be a link on probably on the common mark website
should have a list of all of the libraries and implementations
okay so spend the rest of the half hour as you wish and unless there's any more questions
I'll leave it to it