[ANN] Tartan wiki parser 0.2.0

[Larry Baltz]

Hi all,

I'd like to introduce you to the Tartan project
(http://tartan.folklogic.net) and get your feedback.  It's a Ruby based
wiki text parser with the following goals:

   1. handle more then one wiki markup but start with Markdown
   2. allow mixing-in of markup rules (eg. Markdown + smartypants +
      tables + wiki links; each as a separate definition)
   3. tests and rule definitions written in a programming language
      neutral format (YAML)
   4. support more than one programming language implementation using
      the same rules and tests

The parser is at version 0.2.0 and currently provides a workable
Markdown parser and test set.  The current Markdown rule set was
developed somewhat in isolation and would benefit significantly from a
review of the perl, javascript and PHP implementations and doesn't
currently handle some "hard" parsing cases.

You can get the source code from RubyForge --
http://rubyforge.org/projects/tartan/.  You can either download the
tarball or use subversion to get the most recent code.

As for how well we've met our goals so far, goals 2 and 3 are met pretty
well and are used extensively in the Informl project (see
http://informl.folklogic.net).  For 1, we've started in on Textile, but
there's nothing significant there yet and for 4 we haven't done much,
but Javascript would probably be our next language of choice to do
client side parsing.

I guess I'd like to know if people on the list think the goals are
interesting in other contexts and whether having a language neutral set
of tests or rules can be leveraged in other projects.


Larry Baltz
larry at folklogic.com