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A grammar for standardized wiki markup

Published: 08 September 2008 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

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  • (2013)Design and implementation of wiki content transformations and refactoringsProceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration10.1145/2491055.2491057(1-10)Online publication date: 5-Aug-2013
  • (2011)Design and implementation of the Sweble Wikitext parserProceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration10.1145/2038558.2038571(72-81)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2011
  • (2010)The openFuXML Wiki EngineProceedings of the 2010 Second International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-Line Learning10.1109/eLmL.2010.19(93-98)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2010
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. A grammar for standardized wiki markup

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                          cover image ACM Other conferences
                          WikiSym '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis
                          September 2008
                          219 pages
                          ISBN:9781605581286
                          DOI:10.1145/1822258
                          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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                          Published: 08 September 2008

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                          Author Tags

                          1. wiki creole
                          2. wiki engine performance
                          3. wiki markup
                          4. wiki markup grammar
                          5. wiki markup parser
                          6. wiki markup standard
                          7. wiki markup test cases
                          8. wikis

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                          WikiSym08
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                          WikiSym08: 2008 International Symposium on Wikis
                          September 8 - 10, 2008
                          Porto, Portugal

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                          View all
                          • (2013)Design and implementation of wiki content transformations and refactoringsProceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration10.1145/2491055.2491057(1-10)Online publication date: 5-Aug-2013
                          • (2011)Design and implementation of the Sweble Wikitext parserProceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration10.1145/2038558.2038571(72-81)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2011
                          • (2010)The openFuXML Wiki EngineProceedings of the 2010 Second International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-Line Learning10.1109/eLmL.2010.19(93-98)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2010
                          • (2007)An XML interchange format for Wiki Creole 1.0ACM SIGWEB Newsletter10.1145/1324960.13249652007:Winter(5)Online publication date: Dec-2007
                          • (2007)An EBNF grammar for Wiki Creole 1.0ACM SIGWEB Newsletter10.1145/1324960.13249642007:Winter(4)Online publication date: Dec-2007

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