showdown/README.md
2010-10-31 11:35:28 -07:00

194 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown

NOTE -- Showdown on GitHub
==========================
Please note that I, Corey, am not the author of Showdown. Rather, I found it
some time back at <http://attacklab.net/showdown/> and wanted to see it
available on GitHub.
All credit and praise for authoring this library should go to John Fraser.
Oh, and John Gruber of course.
That said, I have recently see some GitHub forking activity and a pull
request. As such, I will endeavor to ordain myself as a maintainer of
Showdown, at least as it exists on GitHub.
Apologies for any confusion or perceived misinformation.
Cheers,
Corey
Showdown -- A JavaScript port of Markdown
=========================================
Showdown Copyright (c) 2007 John Fraser.
<http://www.attacklab.net/>
Original Markdown Copyright (c) 2004-2005 John Gruber
<http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/>
Redistributable under a BSD-style open source license.
See license.txt for more information.
What's it for?
--------------
Developers can use Showdown to:
* Add in-browser preview to existing Markdown apps
Showdown's output is (almost always) identical to
markdown.pl's, so the server can reproduce exactly
the output that the user saw. (See below for
exceptions.)
* Add Markdown input to programs that don't support it
Any app that accepts HTML input can now be made to speak
Markdown by modifying the input pages's HTML. If your
application lets users edit documents again later,
then they won't have access to the original Markdown
text. But this should be good enough for many
uses -- and you can do it with just a two-line
`onsubmit` function!
* Add Markdown input to closed-source web apps
You can write bookmarklets or userscripts to extend
any standard textarea on the web so that it accepts
Markdown instead of HTML. With a little more hacking,
the same can probably be done with many rich edit
controls.
* Build new web apps from scratch
A Showdown front-end can send back text in Markdown,
HTML or both, so you can trade bandwidth for server
load to reduce your cost of operation. If your app
requires JavaScript, you won't need to do any
Markdown processing on the server at all. (For most
uses, you'll still need to sanitize the HTML before
showing it to other users -- but you'd need to do
that anyway if you're allowing raw HTML in your
Markdown.)
Browser Compatibility
---------------------
Showdown has been tested successfully with:
- Firefox 1.5 and 2.0
- Internet Explorer 6 and 7
- Safari 2.0.4
- Opera 8.54 and 9.10
- Netscape 8.1.2
- Konqueror 3.5.4
In theory, Showdown will work in any browser that supports ECMA 262 3rd Edition (JavaScript 1.5). The converter itself might even work in things that aren't web browsers, like Acrobat. No promises.
Known Differences in Output
---------------------------
In most cases, Showdown's output is identical to that of Perl Markdown v1.0.2b7. What follows is a list of all known deviations. Please email me if you find more.
* This release uses the HTML parser from Markdown 1.0.2b2,
which means it fails `Inline HTML (Advanced).text` from
the Markdown test suite:
<div>
<div>
unindented == broken
</div>
</div>
* Showdown doesn't support the markdown="1" attribute:
<div markdown="1">
Markdown does *not* work in here.
</div>
This is half laziness on my part and half stubbornness.
Markdown is smart enough to process the contents of span-
level tags without screwing things up; shouldn't it be
able to do the same inside block elements? Let's find a
way to make markdown="1" the default.
* You can only nest square brackets in link titles to a
depth of two levels:
[[fine]](http://www.attacklab.net/)
[[[broken]]](http://www.attacklab.net/)
If you need more, you can escape them with backslashes.
* When sublists have paragraphs, Showdown produces equivalent
HTML with a slightly different arrangement of newlines:
+ item
- subitem
The HTML has a superfluous newline before this
paragraph.
- subitem
The HTML here is unchanged.
- subitem
The HTML is missing a newline after this
list subitem.
* Markdown.pl creates empty title attributes for
inline-style images:
Here's an empty title on an inline-style
![image](http://w3.org/Icons/valid-xhtml10).
I tried to replicate this to clean up my diffs during
testing, but I went too far: now Showdown also makes
empty titles for reference-style images:
Showdown makes an empty title for
reference-style ![images][] too.
[images]: http://w3.org/Icons/valid-xhtml10
* With crazy input, Markdown will mistakenly put
`<strong>` or `<em>` tags in URLs:
<a href="<*Markdown adds em tags in here*>">
improbable URL
</a>
Showdown won't. But still, don't do that.
Credits
---------------------------
* Origins
* [John Fraser](http://http://attacklab.net/):
Author of Showdown
* [John Gruber](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/):
Author of Markdown
* Maintenance
* [Corey Innis](http://github.com/coreyti):
GitHub project maintainer
* [Remy Sharp](http://remysharp.com/):
CommonJS-compatibility and more