Chris is keeping these around for his own reference:
DWiki doesn't have as much formatting as some versions of WikiText. It's probably not going to grow any of them, since the wiki rendering engine is already the largest source file (almost twice the size of the next largest, which is the RCS file parsing module).
DWiki's formatting evolves periodically as Chris convinces himself
that the old markup was a bunch of annoying hoops and he needs to do
it simpler. Usually this results in wikirend.py getting larger.
Looking back, DWikiText owes a lot to Markdown syntax; ChrisSiebenmann raided Markdown for a lot of ideas. (As usual, Markdown is more elaborate than DWikiText. I'm gloomy enough about DWiki's code to suspect it might be less code to parse, too.)
Somewhere in here there is an essay about why I differ from, eg, Markdown over things like HTML links. (Terse form: I don't expect external links to be a big part of DWiki pages that we write.)