I’ve been using bitbucket for some time now to host my hgdeps Mercurial extension. I’ve never used any of the many features that bitbucket offers, including issue tracking and wiki hosting.

That changed today when I opened bitbucket and created a new repository, hoping to write down design notes regarding a software that I’m attempting to build. (I’ve made a simple “oscilloscope” – an analog converter that would sample a signal at 160kHz and send the samples through an Ethernet connection. I need a software to display and manipulate the trace. But I digress.)

The wiki engine on bitbucket uses Creole markup. Since I really hate how every wiki engine uses a different markup, I was quite pleased by the attempt at standardization, even if somewhat informal. My initial enthusiasm, however, quickly disappeared when I saw the results that the labor yielded.

Who in their right state of mind would use a double slash to indicate emphasis? Actually, the so-called specification furthers its shameful act by making the double slash result in italics, thus dealing a hurtful blow to all of us that firmly believe in the semantic web. Please people, use Markdown.