Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Interactive Prototype/What about all the nice things Wikitext offers us? Will they be available in Flow?/reply (44)

The text language behind the WMF new tools will be HTML5 + RDFa, which is a general semantic language for knowledge representation. (Being based on HTML, it's not as editor-friendly as wiki markup, which was intended to be lean and human-readable).

While this language is not backwards compatible with wiki markup, the WMF is also developing a translator between both formats called Parsoid, which is expected to have near-full backwards compatibility.

What remains unclear is how much of that compatibility will be used by new tools, built on top of the new storage format. The Flow developers in particular have made it clear that this tool will not support the content existing at current talk pages.