Hacker News Reader

Comment by silverlight | Hacker News Reader

I like it! Simple and elegant. Throw in a little Markdown syntax for bolding, italics, image embeds, etc., and I think you'd be well on your way to a cool thing.

Like others, I wouldn't mind forking/contributing if you ever decided to make it open source, but I respect it all the same if you don't want to go that route. I would actually love to use this as a small part of an ongoing project where we're thinking of including a small wiki functionality (although it would need to be either open source or something that was able to run on our servers for that, not remotely hosted...)

View on HN

Thank you, that's what I was going for! Piki will never use a markup language, but I plan to add drag-and-drop image embedding and right-click text stylization.

People who seem to take the most interest in this also express desire to use it locally. I'll have to figure out a way to cater to you folks.

I'm surprised people want to use it locally; I would have thought yet another local wiki would be the last thing people want.

One can "style" text without a "markup language". For example star text star <- bold. I went further in http://simpliwiki.com/SimpliWiki

> One can "style" text without a "markup language". For example star text star <- bold.

But that's a markup language. The difference between * text * and text is a matter of syntax, not kind. Also, in most forums like this one, asterisk text asterisk gives italic text.

It becomes a "markup" language (ala markdown, etc) when the "markups" are removed and replaced by htlm codes. As you noted, in HN, when using stars they get removed and replace by some ... stuff.

> It becomes a "markup" language (ala markdown, etc) when the "markups" are removed and replaced by htlm codes.

No. Asterisks that aren't lexical content are markup. HTML tags are also markup, just a different markup. When you replace asterisks with HTML tags, you're translating from one markup to another.

The markup cycle ends when the markup is rendered as styled text that a human recognizes as lexical content. For example, italicized text.

Sorry, my explanations were confusing.

The thing is I don't "replace" asteriks with HTLM tags, I keep the asterisks visible.

If star text star displays star text star in bold (ie, not removing the stars, inserting stuff around the whole construct), is it still a "markup language" ?

Let say I process a text file to display it in HTML and the only addition I do is say "quoted content gets italicized". Is that a "markup language", or just some "text embellishment"?

The issue I am trying to address is the learning curve with all the existing markup languages. Without going the "wysiwyg" editing way, that is.

I figured out that if the "marks" are visible in the final result, they get easy to learn.

Along with the right-click menu, I plan on creating keyboard shortcuts for text stylization (Ctrl+B for bold, etc). This would allow one to bold/unbold in the process of writing without touching their mouse, as well as to easily bold selected text.

As far as the star goes, I want to use it for beginning bulleted lists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com