[ANN] PHP Markdown 1.0.2b7

[Michel Fortin]

This is a new release for PHP Markdown, following Markdown.pl 1.0.2b7  
from a few weeks ago. It fix the same bugs, and some more; it also  
introduce more radical backend changes. It can be downloaded here:

<http://www.michelf.com/docs/projets/php-markdown-1.0.2b7.zip>

and you can test it on the PHP Markdown Dingus:

<http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/dingus/>

This version inaugurates the truly extensible version of PHP Markdown  
which should make it a lot easier to write extensions, like my own  
PHP Markdown Extra. If you want to create your own extension, I  
suggest to take a look at the code for the new PHP Markdown Extra  
I'll release in a few minutes. The most interesting part is probably  
the constructor for the MarkdownExtra_Parser class.

Another big change is the automatic hashing of all Markdown-generated  
HTML content. Previous versions of PHP Markdown Extra were already  
doing this, but it was limited on block-level elements only and was  
done to have less call to make to the expensive html block parser.  
This has been ported to the more basic PHP Markdown, and in addition  
to hashing block-level content it now also hash span-level elements:  
this has the benefit of preventing bad nesting of elements, so  
something like this:

     *Some **strange* emphasis**

will now give valid HTML:

     *Some <strong>strange* emphasis</strong>

It should be noted however that fixing this introduced other nesting  
problems -- like being able to put a [link [inside](#) a link](#).  
These problems will be addressed in a future release.


Original improvements in PHP Markdown 1.0.2b7:

*   Changed span and block gamut methods so that they loop over a
     customizable list of methods. This makes subclassing the parser  
a more
     interesting option for creating syntax extensions.

*   Also added a "document" gamut loop which can be used to hook  
document-level
     methods (like for striping link definitions).

*   Changed all methods which were inserting HTML code so that they  
now return
     a hashed representation of the code. New methods `hashSpan` and  
`hashBlock`
     are used to hash respectivly span- and block-level generated  
content. This
     has a couple of significant effects:
	
     1.  It prevents invalid nesting of Markdown-generated elements  
which
         could occur occuring with constructs like `*something [link*] 
[1]`.
	2.  It prevents problems occuring with deeply nested lists on which
         paragraphs were ill-formed.
	3.  It removes the need to call `hashHTMLBlocks` twice during the the
         block gamut.
	
     Hashes are turned back to HTML prior output.

*   Made the block-level HTML parser smarter using a specially- 
crafted regular
     expression capable of handling nested tags.

*	Solved backtick issues in tag attributes by rewriting the HTML  
tokenizer to
	be aware of code spans. All these lines should work correctly now:
	
		<span attr='`ticks`'>bar</span>
		<span attr='``double ticks``'>bar</span>
		`<test a="` content of attribute `">`

*   Changed the parsing of HTML comments to match simply from `<!--`  
to `-->`
     instead using of the more complicated SGML-style rule with  
paired `--`.
     This is how most browsers parse comments and how XML defines  
them too.

*   `<address>` has been added to the list of block-level elements  
and is no
     being incorrectly wrapped within paragraph tags.


Improvements borrowed from Markdown.pl:

*   Now only trim trailing newlines from code blocks, instead of  
trimming
     all trailing whitespace characters.

*   Fixed bug where this:

         [text](http://m.com "title" )
		
     wasn't working as expected, because the parser wasn't allowing  
for spaces
     before the closing paren.

*   Filthy hack to support markdown='1' in div tags.

*   _DoAutoLinks() now supports the 'dict://' URL scheme.

*   PHP- and ASP-style processor instructions are now protected as
     raw HTML blocks.

		<? ... ?>
		<% ... %>

*	Experimental support for [this] as a synonym for [this][].

*   Fix for escaped backticks still triggering code spans:

         There are two raw backticks here: \` and here: \`, not a  
code span


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/