Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
1. Simplicity Some people argues that it's easier to type quickbook I might argue that it's actually opposite. Granted if you use vi XML editing is not fun. But myriads of modern XML editors simplify the process marginally. There several WYSWYG editors producing DocBook (and I don't need to enter markup at all!) and this trend is going to grow. In addition you get immediate format validation and presentation (using assigned stylesheets)
First, I would like to say that I do know a lot about XML and related technologies, at least enough to write XSL Stylesheets. While XML can be nice to structure textual data, I think XML is just plain horrible to author documents. Of course, I'm not talking of using a WYSIWYG editor, simply because I hate those, especially XML-related ones (actually, LyX is almost decent, but I'd rather use LaTeX directly). Editing a document with a wiki-like syntax just requires a regular text editor (syntax highlighting can be a nice addon though), and it already looks nice in the text editor. You're not lost with deep indentations of XML nodes. With wiki-like syntax, a table just looks like a table, to emphasize a word you actually emphasize it with special obvious characters, etc. Meaning you can quickly read and understand the document while editing it, unlike with XML where you have to figure out what the node tree is and what it does. I'm not the only one who likes that. Wiki syntaxes exist for a reason. Quickbook certainly isn't the best Wiki syntax ever, but it's still pretty good.