Keith Devens .com

Entry 1733

StructuredText blogging?

Mark Pilgrim: "Are there any blogging tools that support StructuredText rules for writing blog posts?"

Mine does Or at least it will. I've looked at StructuredText a lot. First, here are some links to stuff about StructuredText (some from Mark): StructuredTextRules, An Introduction to StructuredText by Paul Everitt, the StructuredTextWiki, StructuredTextNG (next generation), Help on StructuredText, and reStructuredText.

There are about three reasons why I haven't enabled it yet on my weblog. First, it slows the page down (see StructuredTextProcessingIsTooSlow). Rendering it is relatively expensive... lots of regexes, etc. Second, I wanted to improve my parser a little more. Third, I hadn't really decided fully on my syntax... is ~this italic~ and this bold or is this italic and this bold? Finally, once I decide on a syntax and start writing weblog posts with it, I'd better not change it again or my posts will change so I wanted to be sure what I had was right.

One of main issues with StructuredText is that it has to have a high level of dwimmetry or it gets in the way. But how do you really get bold text instead of bold text when that's what you want?

I want to take a look at the StructuredTextNG project and see what they've come up with. Putting StructuredText formatting on my weblog was one of my long-term goals

However, I never really thought much about how other products do their formatting. How do they? I know Radio has some built in formatting tools which generate HTML, but when you write your blog in MoveableType, how does that work? Ok, here's how. I guess otherwise you just type in your HTML.

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18:57 (utc-5)
edited: 20:17 (utc-5)