From a users perspective, this system does not use a standard wiki markup language but tries to use the minimal possible semantic markup which will allow the parser code to understand what sort of document and text is being dealt with. This approach means that the source text documents remain, in some sense, clean, in that they do no become weighed down with codes and hashes and funny punctuation marks.

I believe this is an advantage in that the authors of the documents are not distracted by all these wiki codes.

java -cp Web.jar FaqDocument textfile > webpage.html

jview /cp Web.jar FaqDocument textfile > webpage.html

For example, the FAQ tags say something about the 'meaning' of the text within the tags rather than saying anything about how the document should be layed out or formatted when it is displayed visually. The idea of this is to remove from the writer the burden of having to decide how the document should look when he or she is attempting to write. The writer can decide how the document should look afterwards. Also, if you look at the text file which these HTML pages were generated from, you will see that the 'source' is quite clean. That is to say there are very few tags in the text files, which makes them easier to read and I believe easier to maintain.

This is based on the principle that it is better and more creative to think about one sort of thing at a time.

It appears that Markdown still allows the writer to put formatting code into the text document. Therefore I feel that my system has a slightly different outlook from Markdown. This system attempts to encourage the writer to think about semantic content rather than visual content, but does not force the writer to categorize his or her writing.

XML is a strict format which requires or at least encourages the author to make decisions about the categories of information which his or her writing will be dealing with, but often writers do not wish to make these sort of decisions or are not able to make these decisions because their ideas about the nature of what they are writing about are vague and will develope during the course of their writing. For this reason I prefer a non strict format which attempts to make guesses about the semantic content of the text.

Most wiki systems and text transformations use regular expressions but this system actually parses the text document to find the structures. This is slower and more complex than a regular expression system but it allows more precise control of the way the document is transformed and allows a type of 'query' to be made of the document about its content. For example the FAQ class can determine how many questions there are in the document and how many answers where as a regular expression system would have difficulty in finding that information.

This means that the syntax of the text documents is determined by the parsing which the objects do of the document and so to change the document syntax requires changing those parsing routines. In some cases this is simple but in other cases not so simple.

'[webdir http://www.yahoo.com]'

u- The first item
   - the second item
   - the last item, followed by a blank line.

http://www.google.com  or  www.google.com

link://TextLink.java  or link:///lang/web/TextLink.java

http://www.google.com 'google'

The concept is not that simple to explain but is easiest to grasp by exclusion. A microsoft word document is NOT plain text because it contains codes whose purpose is to provide information about the formatting visually of the document and those codes are not themselves characters or letters.

Plain text is important because the internet is built on plain text protocols and because plain text acts as a useful interchange format between different types of computers.

The transformation code here uses plain text transformations and plain text markup codes. The upshot of this is that documents can be written in any text editor such as Microsoft Notepad or Unix Vim and then transformed to a 'fancy' format such as HTML.