It seems that all the simplified syntaxes for writing html out there fail to consider eficiency. They seem to consider blindly only usability. One of the relevant syntax example is the link. Both markdown and creoele (the syntax for wikipedia like wiki), fail to provide the simplest form for link that is [this is a link] or [http://mobiphil.com]. One of the mos frequent syntax elements on html pages are the links itself, so why should we not allocate that syntax element ([this is i link]) for that. Creole wants to force me to use double “[", that is [[this is a link]], markdown even more complicated syntax [name][http://this is a link].

Again I would preffer the creole way, but with one “[”. There were excuses that “[” is used alone. My answer is do it as it is done in computing for ages. Invent an escape character, that can be easily “\” and use “\[” if you want a “[”

As you may know one of the issues in selecting a wiki engine is the syntax. Some people do not face this aspect as they ignore the differences of the syntax of different implementations. In some enterprises the person responsible for evaluating wiki engines is even not aware about these differences in syntax.

The site http://www.wikicreole.org organized itself in form of wiki tries to define some standards based on the feedback of different users. The engine used by them is the mediawiki,JSPWiki therefore it is easy to guess that they try to promote the notation used on mediawiki. So far this is not bad as, probably the most used engine is the mediawiki, and several users agree that the notation is. However I think the less agreed topic is the syntax for internal links.

On the page http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Talk.LinksReasoning, there are some discussins, about which form of syntax should be standardized for links .

Personally I would not make any difference between external or internal syntax and this should be as following.

[This is a link]

this could be extended to

[This is a link|with this and that proporties]

Arguments:

The argument is related to economy of writing and encoding. In a well structured wiki, ideas/concepts are splitted up to an optimal size/granularity, that is depending on the topic of that wiki. This involves that pages will contains lots of links to each other, and probably the most used “sign” would be that for link. Why the user would not have the simplest tool to write these links. Why would it not be enough to write [this page] with only ONE square bracket?? If one would use the single bracket for some other purpose there are different ways to “escape” that character.

My argument is much powerful on handheld devices where you have limited input capabilities…