November 2005
Intermediate to advanced
496 pages
11h 9m
English
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Hack #35. Enter Textile Markup in Web Forms
Add a button to textareas to convert textile input to XHTML.
Textile is a minimalist markup language invented by Dean Allen for his weblog publishing system, Textpattern. Dean originally wrote a Textile-to-XHTML library in PHP. I quickly ported it to Python, and Jeff Minard took my Python version and ported it to JavaScript. Roberto De Almeida hacked together a Greasemonkey script to allow you to enter Textile markup in web forms by calling a CGI script on his server to do the conversion. Then, Phil Wilson improved on Roberto's work by integrating Jeff's JavaScript library, thus making the entire hack self-contained and free of external dependencies.
People ask why I love open source; this hack is why. This script was written by one person, then improved by a second person by integrating code written by a third person, who based his code on the work of a fourth person, who in turn based his code on the work of a fifth person. The end result of this collaboration is that you can write Textile markup in web forms and then convert it to XHTML with a single click. Everything is done locally, and then the form is submitted to the originating site as usual. There are no calls to third-party servers, and the originating site never has to know or care that you originally entered your comments in Textile format. That's just beautiful.
Tip
See a sample of Textile markup at http://textism.com/tools/textile/?sample=2.
The Code
This user script runs on ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.