Every wiki has its own markup, but how well designed are they? One way to tell is to see how hard it is to use a different markup
TWiki, Confluence, Note Studio – I use all of these and they all have proprietary mark-up (e.g. text-only representations of how to do
*bold*)
Its not a problem until I want to push the content beyond the scope of the application. I enter stuff on my Palm Treo 650 copy of Note Studio – I want it to appear on the company wiki. Even if I can get the content over there it would need reformatting.
Bayle Shanks (who I met at WikiSym2005) wrote a wiki gateway to handle the API part of submitting content to a generic interface. I wrote the
TWiki:Codev.SyncContrib (although it remains fairly uobscured in TWiki's SVN) but that only handles TWiki-TWiki syncronisation. And AcroWiki appears to have been completely abandoned by Acrocat software presumably because they have made a name for themselves on pdaabs and acrowiki is not core to what they do.
This leaves me with an integration gap. And while I as a techie could solve it I neither have the time nor inclination to do so. Further, integration is a key step to simplicity: most users see such problems as completely insumountable.