If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.
— Sir Isaac Newton
As any open-source project, this one has benefited from the contributions, both direct and indirect, of many people.
Among the various alternatives, I chose Instiki as the base for this project, because of the elegant code. If you’re going to build a quality application, it pays to start with a quality codebase. For that, I guess I should thank David Heinemeier Hansson, who wrote both the original version of Instiki and the Ruby on Rails framework on which it runs.
Andrea Censi, the author of Maruku, has been incredibly receptive to my suggestions and requests. To a large extent, the richness of this branch of Instiki is a reflection of the richness of Maruku and of his willingness to extend Maruku in the directions that would be most helpful here.
Eric Meyer‘s S5 is one of those things that, when you first see it, knocks your socks off. It’s hard to believe such beautiful slide shows are just HTML+CSS+Javascript. But it had a fearsome reputation for being irredeemably inoperable in XHTML (making it useless for my purposes). Still Andrea’s nifty S5 input syntax for Maruku gave me reason to hope that S5 wasn’t completely irredeemable. And, indeed, it wasn't.
Jason Blevins has contributed many bugfixes and code improvements. Instiki is a much better application, thanks to his efforts.
Ari Stern contributed the BlahTeX/PNG support, for the luddites among you.
Philip Taylor has been tireless in uncovering XML well-formedness bugs in Instiki. XML may be tough, but it’s a lot easier with Philip beating on the application.
Andrew Stacey, Toby Bartels, and the crew at ncatlab.org have been extraordinarily helpful, finding bugs, suggesting new features, and giving the software a good stress-test, on what is surely the largest Instiki installation anywhere.
Sam Ruby inspired the original XHTML Sanitizer that I wrote for Instiki, ported it to HTML5lib, and coaxed me into joining that software project. Sam really knows his way around Rails, and has been a very helpful source of advice and encouragement. Thanks, Sam!