wiki syntax and rendering problems - AndyGlew/SW-HW-notes-and-reviews GitHub Wiki

Amusingly, I started the Home page Of this wiki using the MediaWiki syntax.

But I did not get very far before I started suffering a problem typical of many wiki syntaxes that are translated or rendered into HTML to view on a webpage:

• MediaWiki says to use a blank line to separate paragraphs
• but for some reason, two paragraphs operated by such a blank line were distinct with respect to margin alignment, but the vertical space was swallowed up and inappropriate
• Worse, kluge fixes in one place, and the problem migrates, e.g. to the next set of paragraphs

This is amusing because it is a widespread problem with many different wikis, whether Markdown or MediaWiki or the original wiki syntax. Or, for that matter, with pseudo-WYSIWYG wikis like Atlassian Confluence.

And not just wikis: who has not had the pain of copy/pasting formatted text from one application into another, e.g. into Outlook, and having formatting get broken? Not totally broken, but things like paragraph spacing and fonts and ...

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Relevance: the ubiquity of such bugs is a big motivation against creating Yet Another Markup Language. Would it not be better to get reasonable implementations of some standard markup language?

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If I were writing this in a WYSIWYG wiki such as Atlassian Confluence, I would probably have just copy/pasted some screen shots of the broken rendering. It is a pain to describe them verbally, and much of a hassle to save those screenshots to a file and link here.