I'm a big fan of Wiki-like syntax for marking up text to display on the web. Apparently, I'm not the only one, as there has been an effort to standardize the various Wiki editing dialects into a common Wiki style. The http://www.wikicreole.org/ project is the most visible result of that effort, as they've attempted to codify a number of common Wiki markup rules into a loose standard that all Wikis can adopt. Unsurprisingly, their Wiki Creole is pretty similar what you probably already know if you spend much time on Wikipedia or any other site powered by Media Wiki. Many wiki engines already support Wiki Creole: the PmWiki I setup for the Society And Technology group at UW, the OddMuse wiki that run my personal site, and a ton of others.
One place that doesn't support Wiki Creole is the Blogger software that runs this blog. It'd be nice if I could just edit my posts using Wiki Creole directly (anyone have any ideas?), but in the meantime, there are some intermediate solutions.
The kids over at http://www.meatballsociety.org/ actually wrote a Javascript implementation of Wiki Creole 0.4 that you can play with. It's a simple WYSIWYG editor that lets you enter Wikie Creole formatted text into a textfield and get rendered-on-the-fly HTML. Unfortunately, their editor makes it impossible to grab the actual HTML source for the rendered text, making it less than useful if you wish to paste the HTML source into your blog. So I wrote up a slightly modified version at http://www.traditionalcake.org/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi/WikiCreoleEditor that makes grabbing the source HTML a snap. Try it out if you like.
