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simplified markup
I’m interested in systems that convert simple text with optionally simple markup to html. I’ve used 2 such systems now:
- textile, used by textpattern (this site’s publishing system)
- the text formatting used in twiki.
but why?
Two main reasons:
- coding html/xhtml/sgml is tedious
- html/xhtml/sgml code is complex and hard to comprehend
I guess #1 is important to me as the primary author of my documents—simply put, I want to create these documents quickly and easily and have the output be valid html.
#2 becomes important when others must maintain the document. This is a key motivation for the twiki markup language—the system is a group collaboration system, and targeted to people that may not be skilled in html.
Textile extends #1 above to include translation of simple quotes and other punctuation to, um, the “more proper characters”. Matching double quotes become the paired, directional quotes, as in the previous sentence.
"before textile" —“after textile”
historical context
Here are some other systems (in no particular order):
- No-Tags Markup
- txt2html
- setext is described on the meatball wiki. It has been apparently abandoned, but superceeded by other tools.
- zope’s StructuredText
- wikiwiki TextFormattingRules
- reStructuredText from python’s docutils.
- markdown
- smart ASCII
- probably many more…
challenges
These are great for creating documents with simple markup, but you soon want to do something that goes beyond the scope of the tool. As an example, I often want lists in tables. In twiki, tables and lists rely on lines for information about layout. A new line indicates a new list item (or the end of the list). A new line indicates a new row in the table, or the end of the table. Fortunately, twiki allows you to drop in regular html markup as needed, so if you really want a list in a table, you can just put the list tags right in, or code the whole table and list in html.
other strategies
Another technique is to use a wysiwyg editor in a web form. There are a few of these available, too:
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