Similar Systems

EtText-like plain-text-to-markup conversion systems have a long history. The first time I came across the concept was with Setext, which was included with Tony Sanders' Plexus web server, back in September 1993. Yes, 1993. Setext has been around for a while!

WikiWikiWeb is quite a recent, well-established system which uses a similar markup style.

txt2html provided a lot of impetus to rewrite the core of EtText since 2.0, since its list-parsing engine was much better. However EtText is now up to scratch again ;)

The real inspiration for EtText was Userland's Frontier; Dave Winer's evangelisation of its easily-editable markup system convinced me that it was worth polishing up the rudimentary EtText system I had then. In addition, the name "EtText" is derived from "Edit This Text", in a tip of the hat to Dave's "Edit This Page" concept.

Some well-known sites that use their own converters to convert plain-text to markup include http://www.blogger.com/, http://slashdot.org/ (for comments) and http://www.advogato.org/.

Jorn Barger maintains an impressive summary of etext formats at his Robot Wisdom site. Skip down to section 3, Internet etext standards, for the directly-relevant stuff.

Zope and ZWiki use a format called StructuredText, which again comes from WikiLand. There's some interesting work going on there with the STXDocument object, which is "a web-managable object that contains information marked up in the structured text format".