<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>
EtText: Documentation: Similar Systems
</title>
<meta name="generator" content="WebMake/2.2" />
<style>
body {
background-color: #ffffff;
color: #000000;
font-size: medium;
font-family: verdana,lucida,helvetica,sans-serif;
}
// OL,UL,P,BODY,TD,TR,TH,FORM {
// font-family: verdana,lucida,helvetica,sans-serif;
// font-size: medium;
// color: #000000;
}
code, samp, pre
{
font-family: monospace;
}
H1 { font-size: large; font-family: Garamond,Book Antiqua,Times,serif; }
H2 { font-size: large; font-family: Garamond,Book Antiqua,Times,serif; }
H3 { font-size: medium; font-family: Garamond,Book Antiqua,Times,serif; }
H4 { font-size: small; font-family: Garamond,Book Antiqua,Times,serif; }
H5 { font-size: x-small; font-family: Garamond,Book Antiqua,Times,serif; }
H6 { font-size: xx-small; font-family: Garamond,Book Antiqua,Times,serif; }
A:link {
font-weight: bold;
color: #004000;
text-decoration: underline;
}
A:visited {
font-weight: normal;
color: #008000;
text-decoration: underline;
}
A:active {
font-weight: bold;
color: #800000;
text-decoration: underline;
}
</style>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#3300cc" vlink="#660066">
<font face="lucida,verdana,sans-serif">
<div align="center">
<img src="images/EtTextTitle.png" width="489" height="113" />
</div>
<table width="100%">
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<strong><a href="http://ettext.taint.org/">EtText</a>
Documentation</strong> (version 2.2)
</td>
<td valign="top">
<div align="right">
[ <a href="links.html">Back</a> | <a href="protecting.html">Forward</a> | <a href="index.html">Index</a>
| <a href="allinone.html">All In One</a> ]
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<!-- yes, it's that Mozilla black-border code again ;) -->
<!-- stolen from www.mozilla.org via rc3.org -->
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#aaaaaa">
<table border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" width="100%">
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#ffffff">
<table border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" width="100%">
<tr>
<td>
<h2>Similar Systems</h2><p>
EtText-like plain-text-to-markup conversion systems have a long history. The
first time I came across the concept was with <a href="http://www.bsdi.com/setext/">Setext</a>, which was
included with Tony Sanders' <em>Plexus</em> web server, back in September 1993.
Yes, 1993. Setext has been around for a while!
</p>
<p>
<a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb">WikiWikiWeb</a> is quite a recent, well-established system which uses
a similar markup style.
</p>
<p>
<a href="http://www.aigeek.com/txt2html/">txt2html</a> provided a lot of impetus to rewrite the core of EtText since 2.0,
since its list-parsing engine was <em>much</em> better. However EtText is now up to
scratch again ;)
</p>
<p>
The real inspiration for EtText was Userland's <a href="http://www.userland.com/">Frontier</a>; Dave
Winer's evangelisation of its easily-editable markup system convinced me that
it was worth polishing up the rudimentary EtText system I had then. In
addition, the name "EtText" is derived from "Edit This Text", in
a tip of the hat to Dave's "Edit This Page" concept.
</p>
<p>
Some well-known sites that use their own converters to convert
plain-text to markup include <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">http://www.blogger.com/</a>, <a href="http://slashdot.org/">http://slashdot.org/</a>
(for comments) and <a href="http://www.advogato.org/">http://www.advogato.org/</a>.
</p>
<p>
Jorn Barger maintains an impressive summary of etext formats at <a href="http://www.robotwisdom.com/net/etextfaq.html">his Robot
Wisdom site</a>. Skip down to section 3, <em>Internet etext
standards</em>, for the directly-relevant stuff.
</p>
<p>
Zope and ZWiki use a format called <a href="http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/StructuredText">StructuredText</a>, which again comes from
WikiLand. There's some interesting work going on there with the <a href="http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/StructuredTextWiki/STXDocument">STXDocument</a>
object, which is "a web-managable object that contains information marked up
in the structured text format".
</p>
<p>
</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table width="100%">
<tr>
<td valign="top">
<strong><a href="http://ettext.taint.org/">EtText</a>
Documentation</strong> (version 2.2)
</td>
<td valign="top">
<div align="right">
[ <a href="links.html">Back</a> | <a href="protecting.html">Forward</a> | <a href="index.html">Index</a>
| <a href="allinone.html">All In One</a> ]
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div align="right">
<a href="http://webmake.taint.org/"><img src="images/BuiltWithWebMake.png" border="0" width="88" height="31" /></a>
</div>
</font>
</body>
</html>
