My initial feeling was that many newbies don't read the markup info anyway, and to present multiple markup choices might be even more confusing than sticking to one - or it will be just ignored anyway as is the existing information.

Having thought about that a little further, the aim of the OP was perhaps to make the posting a little easier for those with little or no markup experience and that actually might make it easier for some newbie folk to actually post something readable first time out. Or not. The problem is they aren't reading the info that is out there and many do seem to have expectation that perlmonks is like any other phpBB/wiki thing out there.

I have a high level of experience in (X)HTML so the perlmonks markup style has never bothered me. I have so very little experience of writing POD I might as well say no experience of it, but I suspect that is not true for most other monks. I have used wiki markup, the phpBB markup and others but I'm not actually a huge fan of wiki markup and the phpBB seems to be the defacto for a lot of forums these days. When the wiki markup came out came out, I couldn't understand what precisely was the difference between learning the existing markup and the new markup system. For me it was and still is counterintuitive to use --- to mean strikeout or [[[[[ for whatever it means. Whereas everyone else thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Whatever. It was also rather condescendingly presented to me as something for people who didn't know (X)HTML markup and, as I did and I was annoyed about the condescension, I figured I didn't really need to learn how to use it.

The [ ... ] markup introduces not only shorthand but also a layer between the link and the write up so if parts of a link path change in the future, these can be accommodated. This has already been pointed out by another poster in this thread. I have no idea if other markup provides such a layer. I don't think phpBB does and I am not sure about wiki

If we introduced wiki markup then it wouldn't be fair not to concede to POD markup and then we'd have to choose what is the default markup. By the argument that everyone finds it too hard to read the markup rules and they want one they know already .. well .. that applies differently to different folk ... you POD, me XHTML and others wiki.... and we'd be stuck taking votes to see which is the most popular markup

Then the temptation to randomly select the default markup starts to show up ... oh dear.... could spend years developing arcane pseudo-random selection methods...

In reply to Re^4: Wiki-Style syntax for posting by LesleyB
in thread Wiki-Style syntax for posting by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
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