Textual markup languages (was Re: What YAML engine do you use?)

[Fredrik Lundh]

Alan Kennedy wrote:

> From what I've seen, pretty much every textual markup targetted for web content, e.g. wiki markup, 
> seems to have grown/evolved organically, meaning that it is either underpowered or overpowered, 
> full of special cases, doesn't have a meaningful object model, etc.

I spent the eighties designing one textual markup language after another,
for a wide variety of projects (mainly for technical writing).  I've since come
to the conclusion that they all suck (for exactly the reasons you mention above,
plus the usual "the implementation is the only complete spec we have" issue).

these days, I usually use HTML+custom classes for authoring (and run them
through a HTML->XHTML converter for processing).

the only markup language I've seen lately that isn't a complete mess is John
Gruber's markdown:

    http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

which has an underlying object model (HTML/XHTML) and doesn't have too
many warts.  not sure if anyone has done a Python implementation yet, though
(for html->markdown, see http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/html2text/ ), and I
don't think it supports footnotes (HTML doesn't).

> If I can't find such a markup language, then I might instead end up using a WYSIWYG editing 
> component that gives the user a GUI and generates (x)html.
>
> htmlArea: http://www.htmlarea.com/
> Editlet:  http://www.editlet.com/
>
> But I'd prefer a markup solution.

some of these are amazingly usable.  have you asked your users what they
prefer?  (or maybe you are your user? ;-)

</F>