wiki round tripping (was: Ideas Please)

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Jeff Schering wrote:

>I agree 100%. But the problem is not that moin->DocBook is impossible.
>Rather, the problem is that DocBook->moin->DocBook is impossible
>because of the information loss during the DocBook->moin
>transformation. What is possible is DocBook->moin->DocBook(2), where
>DocBook(2) is a pale imitation of the original DocBook document.
>
>If software was intelligent enough to read and understand plain text,
>it could render certain words and phrases appropriately. However, we
>don't have Artificial Intelligence yet, so we have to give the
>software hints. That's what DocBook is for. A human can read  the text
>and figure out which words refer to file names, and which words refer
>to commands, and then mark up those words with <filename></filename>
>or <command></command> tags as appropriate. The tags act as hints to
>the transformation software, which converts that descriptive markup
>into presentation markup such as html, pdf, or moin.
>
What if we use custom moin smileys to represent certain markup? (see:
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/HelpOnSmileys ) Moin understands markup
like <!>, {3}, etc. and turns it into small symbols (smileys and other
symbols). We could define some of these to represent certain DocBook
markup. Currently, if you write something like '{*} text {o}' in Moin,
that will render with a star before and after the text, and this could
be converted into an opening and closing tag in DocBook. We just have to
define more {xyz} tags in the smiley code of moin. See:
http://test.wiki.ubuntu.com/doc/MoinToDocIdeas

I've brought DocBook conversion up in the #moin channel and it seems
there are two ways of doing this, either we could write a docbook
formatter in python (http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/FormatterMarket) or
a transform from a simple HTML page like
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/FrontPage?action=print

Also see:
http://moinmaster.wikiwikiweb.de/?action=format&mimetype=dom/xml
<http://moinmaster.wikiwikiweb.de/?action=format&mimetype=dom/xml>

You might want to stop by the #moin channel to exchange ideas.

- Henrik