CreoleWiki: Proposed Meta Standard

Proposal for Meta Standard

Whilst trying to create a standard for others, Creole itself fails because there is no attempt to enforce any kind of standard on Creole in terms of the markup with the possibilty that any old markup can be proposed. Having looked at Creole I think the following are true:

1. Most markup consists of either two or more identical opening and closing characters and two or more matched brackets. e.g. **BOLD**, ====Header3==== or[[link]] **
2. Markup referring to the following line(s ... this is ambiguous!!!) is placed at the beginning of the line e.g. ^# (numbered list) ^| (table)
   1. A paragrpah is a special instance of above where the first character on the line is a newline character (although the actual encoding may be different)
3. Some markup has a sequence of four identical characters: ----
4. The only single character markup is the tilda ~
5. Within markup sequences, | has a special meaning and is used to separate parts of the markup e.g. [[http://eieio.com|McDonald's farm]]

If this framework were adopted as a "meta standard", it would allow users to have some idea of markup sequences that should not cause a problem. E.g. I wonder can I write: <ref> in this creole, because someone might just have created this markup. Whereas, if all markup starts either at the beginning of a line for specific well-known cases, or consists of at least two identical characters, then I will know for certain that so long as I don't use two of the same characters in a line it will NEVER be interpreted as markup by any compliant wiki.

Special Characters

<STUB> This is a quick write of my recollection of the special characters!

The following are never considered special characters and will not be interpreted as markup:

[a-z][A-Z][0-9]

The following have special meaning and may initiate the interpretation of the following text as markup:

1. Whitespace (causes following spaces to be ignored)
2. newline (special case)
3. =*#/|{[~-

The following are reserved for future and may be used for markup:

1. ^@:<>

**OK, I'm trying to put a link within three curly brackets, but each time I do it, it removes a curly bracket. That is why we need a meta standard, not so I can put a curly bracket in, but so I know that that there won't be some strange markup rule on this new wiki which I then have ot spend hours trying to work out why this particular wiki doesn't accept what I think should be a perfectly sensible character sequence. And wouldn't it be nice to have some kind of footnote! (after adding note discovered it wasn't the markup but the CATCHA ... so the fact I wasn't certain about the markup, would mean that I spent time trying to work out why three curly brackets at the end of a line might be a problem instead of realising it wasn't the markup but the fact I had not entered the catcha ... amply demonstrates why a meta standard is needed ... because everyone is going to adapt the standard! And the problem of CREOLE is not what is contained in the standard, but knowing what you can write without someone somewhere just happening to have used your favourite funny characters as some new kind of markup)