intertwingly

This panel did not result in any bloodshed.  Which is a bit unfortunately, really, as I believe that the panel format works best if there is some controversy.  Unfortunately, each of the participants were too damn agreeable.

However, it was a good session in that a number of people who didn't know much about wikis got a flavor of what wikis are, and those that have used wikis before got a number of questions answered.

One key problem that we identified was the wiki syntax - both from a learning curve point of view and from a wiki tool lock-in perspective.  It would be really nice if we could define a unified inport/export syntax that tools can use, either to PUT data to a wiki, or to migrate data from one wiki to another.

An obvious candidate would be (X)HTML, as every wiki provides some form of export to (X)HTML today.  The problem is import: one should not have to implement a renderer comparable to IE or Mozilla to do a credible job.  A profile or subset is called for.

Ari Steward expressed an interest in working on such a profile and implementing it on his wiki.  I could do the same for MoinMoin, and perhaps if we could get a few other proof points, adoption would snowball.

If we could then get blog client tools to produce this same markup, then editing a wiki page could be as editing a weblog entry.