Requests for comment/Markdown

This document is an attempt to develop a strategy around the Markdown family of markup languages.

Background
Wikitext has benefited from years of iterative improvement, guided by years of focus on complicated content (such as the Wikimedia sites). For the past few years, MediaWiki users have benefited from the implementation independent implementations.

Wikitext is a very powerful and complicated markup format. For users that need the power (e.g. Wikipedia), the capabilities are essential.

Problem
The power of wikitext and the popularity of Wikipedia has created a difficult problem. Wikis were originally designed to reduce complexity. As Ward Cunningham noted in a 1995 email explaining his early wiki software, he pointed out that his new website editing software "has a forms-based authoring capability that doesn't require familiarity with html".

MediaWiki wikitext became complex due to years of evolution. MediaWiki evolved rapidly to keep pace with the rapid growth of Wikipedia, and the corresponding growth in the use of wiki software. Other wiki software was able to differentiate itself from MediaWiki by providing simpler (but less powerful) alternatives to MediaWiki wikitext.

In 2003, the Wikitext standard page was created. The original author wrote:


 * A single Wikitext standard based on Wikitext syntax as supported by mediawiki is of great importance for the evolution of the Wikiverse:
 * A clear standard can be published and supported by other wikis, like MoinMoinWiki (-based) and tikiwiki (see sourceforge), which are very popular, and more extensible than mediawiki, which has serious structural problems
 * Even if mediawiki can keep up with those other packages, text import/export has to be one of our priorities, given the objectives of this project to become a central GNU FDL repository of trusted text for use all over the place.
 * The Wikimedia activities shouldn't be in any way trapped or tied to mediawiki, if drastically better software emerges from tikiwiki or the Python world. And it will.

MediaWiki content editors would benefit from having good interchange formats for cutting and pasting rich text into VE/Parsoid than the multitude of "text/html compliant" markup out there.

In 2016, MediaWiki wikitext seems to be largely relegated to MediaWiki use (and tools that must interoperate with MediaWiki wikis).

Absent a change in direction in the industry, we anticipate we will need to build in support for complicated library to parse GMail, Word Docs, MediaWiki markup, everything that pandoc supports, Parsoid HTML, and whatever other format claims the "text/html" media type

In particular, cutting and pasting text typically involves one of two formats: The text/enriched media type () hasn't been replaced. XXfixme - is RFC 1563 still in widespread use in modern applications?
 * 1) plain text (as described in section 1.1 of )
 * 2) HTML, which includes the horrifying diaspora of complicated "compliant" sources noted above

Markdown
Markdown seems to on track to become a new intermediate text representation for markup. It has widespread support, and there is IETF work occuring to better specify the format ().

Can we evolve our platform to support Markdown as a first class citizen (especially for cutting and pasting)?

Powering ahead with HTML
It will be a while before "text/markdown" has widespread, mainstream use (if it ever does). See T127329 for strategies that deal with the web of today as we know it.

Questions

 * Are there any ArchCom-RFCs for this already?
 * Any code to support this?
 * Should this document evolve into an ArchCom RFC?