To date, RDoc is pretty much the nicest text markup language I've seen. In comparison:

• RST is super powerful. It lets you do complete documents in text. That's pretty awesome. But it requires you to do ''everything'' in text, which gets to be a pain.

  • Mediawiki syntax is powerful, but it's something only a mother could love, and only when she isn't wearing glasses.

  • Markdown is a decent syntax, but it really doesn't do very much. And of course it has a bug that doesn't display lists properly (like this one).

  • BBC, as one of the early precursors for this kind of thing, needs to take it's place in history along the IMSAI and TRS-80--entities which, although beautiful time, can now be regarded as so limited in functionality and so out-of-step with current aesthetics that it should be taken out back and buried.

What's needed is something that hits the "sweet spot", allowing for the most commonly used and easily-encoded markup in text, in a readable way, and that lets you less common (but occasionally useful) markup using HTML tags.

To date, RDoc has come the closest to hitting that sweet spot, imo. Maybe someday an even more impressive language will make an appearance. (:_) But in the meantime, it would be nice if RDoc were a language choice.

(That might be difficult for the Wiki, since it doesn't have syntax for Wiki links. But it would certainly be useful for forum posts.)