Markdown dialect tailored towards prose, and occasional custom markup
Basically because I spotted Markdown on Stack Overflow too late (i.e. after creating the crappy PHP version of this thing). I decided to keep it.
- It will have (now so familiar) human-readable markup, somewhat based on old school plain text messaging conventions
- It can mostly represent arbitrary HTML markup. (the main limitation is that it usually generates
<p>tags around text). - One single markup language: doesn’t rely on inline HTML.
- No implicit URLs, URLs are usually enclosed in angle brackets (moderately old school types remember this from e-mail headers).
- Allow user hooks, for the occasional application-specific markup.
A basic example will look very familiar:
List:
- item
- item with **bold text**
> Quote
To handle the random markup (and images) there are 3 extra constructs:
Span: Text can be grouped into a span with square brackets
This is [text in a span].
Tag: uses curly brackets and XML syntax with a few extensions borrowed from CSS. A tag can decorate a line level or block level construct, or can occur by itself. A few examples:
Boring XML: {class="emoticon" src="http://www.example.org/smile.png"}
Alternative syntax: {.emoticon <http://www.example.org/smile.png>}
{.fancy-p}
On a block element.
{.fancy-em} _On a line level element_.
If the element type cannot be inferred from the construct it is attached to, it will
be a semantically empty tag. Unless it has a src property, then it will become
an image.
URL: is inside angle brackets. Can exist by itself, or turn a preceding element into a link. That order was borrowed from e-mail conventions.
This is [text in a link] <http://www.example.org>.
This is a link with the URL itself as text: <http://www.example.org>. The fact that the
period is not part of the URL is easy to understand.