> Basically I meant that we should just go for a simple custom formatter and > not try to improve the existing textile formatter.
Agreed. It will be easiest to first add just enough formatting necessary for the needs of ESME and then think about full-blown parsers. Not that the latter is not worth investing in, but it will take more effort. > David suggested ANTLR and maybe we should give it a try and write a custom > formatter. ANTLR would be nice for something where speed is important and parsing is complex, like parsing scala syntax in a beautifier. For an occasional comment in a blog liftweb-textile should be OK, I guess. > Another crazy idea that just came to my mind would be to use javascript on > the client side to do the formatting. Not sure whether this could be easily > support all the features ESME needs, but markdown formatting using > javascript is possible : > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1319657/javascript-to-convert-markdown-textile-to-html-and-ideally-back-to-markdown-te > points to http://attacklab.net/showdown/ > > Stackoverflow itself does on the fly formatting, which I think is a nifty > feature. This is not a crazy idea at all, however I had the idea to apply formatting to automatically generated messages, and not based on lightweight formatting rules only.
