Wiki markup language with excellent table support

Question

I'm developing a wiki with Python/Django, partly for educational purposes. Up to now I'm still missing the right markup language. I tried quite a view, including Creole and Markdown, which worked well except for the table support. Common wiki markup languages seem to support only rudimentary tables, i.e. a single line per cell or no complex markups within cells. But the users of my wiki want to be able to create tables with bigger formatet text and lists within the cells. I have my problems with finding a markup language which actually can do this.

I've gazed upon the MediaWiki markup language which seems to support everything but I think using this would be overkill. The rest of the markup can be quite simple with focus on easy-writability of markup (I find MediaWiki markup somewhat ugly sometimes). Furthermore, there must be a Python module for translating markup into HTML which I can use in the webapp. I'm still looking for one for MediaWiki markup.

Another alternative would be to dump wiki markup languages at all and instead allow a set of defined HTML tags for markup. But that makes it harder to write wiki articles, since HTML is not invented for such use. and also finding and escaping forbidden HTML could be quite tricky. I would rather have a nice markup language with a lightweight Python implementation.

Does anyone know of a markup language with extended table support and an implementation in Python which I could use?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I don't know if it meats your needs, but you could use reStructuredText. Sphinx generates html from it for the python documentation and its written in python, so it should be easy to use for this purpose. I find it very neat and easy to read, as its designed to be, and it can do quite complicated tables.