Michel Fortin

[david scotson]

On Wed,  1 Dec 2004 13:05:03 -0500, John Gruber <gruber at fedora.net> wrote:
> 
> I'd love to see forum software that uses Markdown. My only thought
> with that -- and it goes for using Markdown in weblog comments as
> well -- is whether there ought to be a special mode that prevents
> the use of inline block-level HTML in those cases. Or a configurable
> list of tags to block.

The software I use (Moodle, a learning management system: moodle.org)
uses Markdown as well as couple of other formats, including WYSIWYG
HTML, for writing articles, forum posts etc. As text entry is open to
the public/students all formats are run through an HTML stripper with
a preprogrammed list of acceptable tags (I think it strips attributes
with javascript too). It seems to work well and is apparently a common
functionality anywhere were free entry of HTML is an allowed option.

On the subject of wikis, I was looking into this recently (as I am
keen for Moodle's wiki functionality to share the Markdown formatting)
and there is at least one wiki already using markdown: Instiki
(instiki.org). Or at least claiming to, as I can't seem to get it to
work from a brief attempt.

Instiki has three choices for markup: Textile, Markdown or Rdoc (the
ruby documentation format) from which you may guess it is written in
ruby. The ruby implementations of Textile and Markdown and called
RedCloth (redcloth.rubyforge.org) and BlueCloth
(bluecloth.rubyforge.org) respectively. I believe that
http://blue.instiki.org is supposed to be a sandbox for trying the
Bluecloth/Markdown formatting but it just seems to use Textile.

And on the subject of alternate implementations I stumbled across
Markdown.NET the other day:
http://aspnetresources.com/blog/markdown_announced.aspx which I don't
think I've seen mentioned here.

regards,

dave scotson