reStructuredText

[Matt Zimmerman]

Advantages of reStructuredText:

- Approximately WYSIWYG
- The renderer produces warnings when it won't do quite what you expect

Disadvantages of reStructuredText:

- Unforgiving (I almost never get it right on the first attempt)
- Produces warnings even when the user's intent is easily deduced
- In pursuit of WYSIWYG, places cosmetic burdens on the user as part of the
  markup (e.g., enumerated lists are just painful)

In my opinion, the nature of a wiki implies that the most important
attributes for the markup language are that it be:

- Forgiving
- Predictable
- Easy to learn

so that nearly anyone can jump in and start contributing immediately.  I
think that reStructuredText fails on all three accounts.

Some documents which I originally wrote in moin have since been converted to
reStructuredText, and I find them difficult to maintain.  Has the
documentation team standardized on reStructuredText?  If so, can I beg you
to reconsider, at least for simple wiki documents? :-)

-- 
 - mdz