The Birth of Johndown
By Andrew Bruce on Thursday 24th April 10:08 AM
If you've ever been maddened by Markdown or troubled by Textile then Johndown might be what you're after. We'll soon be releasing this new text to XHTML language that we use on our own internal tools. As the name implies, it was originally written by John and is based on Markdown. It's written entirely in Ruby and will have full open source code, with an accompanying Rails plugin.
The unintuitive bits of Markdown that Johndown addresses:
- The need to escape certain characters, such as underscores, with backslashes
- The need to indent pasted code by repeatedly hitting the space bar in browser textareas
- The fact that one has to press space twice at the end of a line to get a line break
We're putting the finishing touches to the first release, including adding a safe mode for avoiding XSS attacks. We'll let you know when it's done!