Myriad

Simon Willison (whose Blog is frequently read here) looks inside « easy ways of hooking markup conversion in to existing applications » « here »:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/04/13/myriadOfMarkupSystems.
We looked into « an extensive list of MT-Plugins related to markup »:http://mt-plugins.org/archives/cat/text_formatting.php, and « some »:http://pear.php.net/pepr/pepr-bbcode-help.php « others »:http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html pointed to us by Simon (Disclaimer: we use MT-Textile, derived from « Dean Allen »:http://www.textism.com/about/’s « Textile »:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/, also cited by SW).
We are tempted to say: none has yet proved to be a real catcher.
Look at it: we all want to write fast, as fast we think, adding just the minimum markup, to obtain a well-marked text, with lovely nested and validating XHTML output… As « one »:http://jclark.org/weblog/ puts it: « I find authoring blog entries in XHTML adds to much friction to the process. Instead of typing what I’m thinking, I end up thinking about what I’m typing. » [« here »:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/04/13/myriadOfMarkupSystems, scroll to datestamp *13th April 2004 15:41*]
Who will build the ultimate text-formatting tool? The one wich I could use without refering to a (small, I concede) list of markup tips, and who will understand all my markup, allowing me to underline an hyphenated wording without using plain vanilla «HTML»?