Pomegranate · 13 January 2003
I said I wasn’t going to write much more about Textpattern on this site, but two big breaks on the road to releasing it happened this weekend, in between the Martin Sheen Apocalypse Now drunken tai ch’i window smashing and keening resulting from concerted efforts at implementing negative lookbehinds, atomic grouping, and regex mode modifications.
- Semiholy grail 1: Textile now not only gussies up plain text, it deals with just about anything you can throw at it, including classically ‘difficult’ characters such as en and em dashes, single and double curly quotes, and high-ascii troublemakers like ® and § and Ω, even when generated by another application. This means that one should now be able to paste in text copied from a word processor on any platform, and see proper corresponding HTML entities in the result. (Cue the user of some bizarre Windows setup somewhere to write and say it’s not working).
- Semiholy grail 2: Alongside Textile now is Detextile, an inverted mirror of its conversion algorithms. This was the final piece of the puzzle. Now both text and HTML versions of articles are synchronized: make a change in one, it shows up in the other. I expect for most people this’ll never be needed, but to the markup-obsessed it should prove useful.
Driving with open windows over bridges at night, the stone balustrades slip by, each like a tiny sip of air.
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