WikiCreole is an attempt at standardizing wiki-text. I had heard of it a while back, but figured it wouldn’t go anywhere since wiki-text is destined for obsolescence. Yet, somehow, the WikiCreole group pushed ahead and has now published its 1.0 spec. While I appreciate this attempt to standardize wiki-text, which differs wildly from wiki to wiki I have to say: WikiCreole is an exercise in futility. There is already a wonderful mark-up language called HTML and it has a wonderful layout and styling facility called CSS. The problem that WikiCreole is addressing is one that doesn’t exist anymore: the ability to create formatted text in the browser. Now we have a healthy choice of good WYSIWYG editors, including Xinha, TinyMCE, FCKeditor, and others.

Truth be told, the real culprit isn’t WikiCreole, but the archaic wiki engines that still rely on wiki-text. Deki Wiki was built with an XML page processing engine since the get go. It allowed us to leap over this whole wiki-text nonsense and immediately integrate with all other systems that use HTML as their representation (i.e. the rest of the Internet).  With our mesmerizing adoption growth, it appears we made the right decision.