Musings

I’ve entirely replaced BlueCloth with Maruku. Andrea has been simply superb in responding to my feature requests and suggestions.

• Both the “Markdown+itex2MML” filter and the regular “Markdown” filter are driven by Maruku. Maruku now supports running in itex-aware and regular Markdown modes, within the same Ruby instance.
• Equation numbering conventions now match the ones I’ve implemented my MovableType plugin. $$...$$ produces an unnumbered equation, \[...\] produces a numbered equation. Numbered equations can have an optional \label{..}. Maruku also supports¹ numbered equations delimited by \begin{equation}...\end{equation}.
• Maruku’s metadata syntax now allows you to insert any legal XHTML attribute for any of the elements generated in Markdown. For instance, you can write

  > Looking at the times his emails were send I have no idea
  > in which time zone he lives (let alone sleeps ...).
  {: cite="http://www.neverendingbooks.org/?p=238" style="color:#944;"}

  and have it produce

  Looking at the times his emails were send I have no idea in which time zone he lives (let alone sleeps …).

  Together with its support for tables and footnotes and whatnot, it’s very rare that there’s a need to enter your own XHTML tags.

Another thing which was fairly crappy in the stock Instiki was the “See Changes” function. This is supposed to produce a redline document, marked up with <del> and <ins>, showing the changes between successive versions of a wiki page. Unfortunately, with the built-in lib/diff.rb, the result was frequently ill-formed gobbledygook. So I ditched lib/diff.rb, in favour of xhtmldiff. Like Maruku, xhtmldiff also uses REXML, and fairly reliably produces well-formed output.

I’ve also had a bit of email back and forth with Matthias Tarasiewicz, the actual maintainer of Instiki. He even committed one of my patches (a cookie-handling fix) to the Instiki trunk. His main focus is adding anti-spam features to Instiki. I had to fix his latest addition, because it didn’t work in XHTML.