From: Ben Bleything <ben@...>
Date: 2009-04-06T01:50:28+09:00
Subject: Re: how to beat minimal wiki features out of redcloth?

On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 9:39 AM, Phlip <phlip2005@gmail.com> wrote:
> Firstly, my code has some <li> tags and whatnot. This command line passed
> them through without decorating them:
>
> ruby -e "require 'rubygems'; require 'redcloth'; puts
> RedCloth.new(File.read('README')).to_html " > doc.html

That's expected.

> I sort of expected &lt;li&gt; instead of <li>. (I am aware that many wiki
> markups cheat and let the user author HTML directly...)

You shouldn't expect that out of Textile.  I think you may have a
misapprehension of what Textile is meant to do.  It's meant to make it
easy to write a document that reads well in raw text but also can
"compile" to nice HTML that has the same semantic meaning (more or
less) than the plain text input.

So, don't expect it to behave like a wiki markup language.  It's not,
and that's not the point of it.

> Next, some wikis use ==header== notation. redcloth took out the == marks,
> and gave me just <p>header</p>

It is strange that it took out the ==, but they're not Textile markup
and wouldn't do anything.  If you want a second-level header, use "h2.
Header"

> Next, I have an indented code sample. Ward's Wiki (and my old wikis) could
> automatically put a <pre> tag around code samples. Nope.
>
> Next, I thought markuppers should generally strew put class='thang'
> attributes around, so a CSS can color them all up. Nope.

Again, not features of Textile.

> Please don't tell me to Google for this - I will only get blog after blog
> gushing about how awesome redcloth is. I'd rather hear either how to get
> these minimal features out of redcloth - without DIY <pre> tags and such
> that would totally defeat the purpose - or hear a suggestion for a better
> wiki markup library!

Instead, allow me to google it for you and provide links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_(markup_language) -- this should
give you the background on Textile and includes links to references
and implementations, so you can get a better idea of what it is (and
is not) for.

http://hobix.com/textile/ -- _why's reference.  He was originally
responsible for redcloth.

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ -- an alternative to
Textile that may behave somewhat closer to what you expect.  BlueCloth
handles this one, as do a few other libraries I'm not familiar with

There are also some wiki-specific markup languages implemented in
Ruby, but I've never used any of them.  A search for ruby wiki should
come up with something, though you may have to dig through wiki app
code to figure out what they're using.

Ben