22:46, Wednesday 9 May., 2001 Link

Hey, so I was chatting with Tom B at work earlier about how to make it easier for people to drop text into the 'site without having to mark it up (to html), and how much better it would be if we could just define "\n\n" (two line breaks) to be understood as "</p><p>", and one line break to be "<br />". That way people could type plain text and we still wouldn't need any processing function.

Then Mike C wanders up and we start joking about xml, saying Well actually it'd be better if people didn't use html but wrapped their paragraphs in "<paragraph>" tags (the joke being that although it's not html, it's doing the same job and but it way more cumbersome (I'm allowed to explain the joke at this point because I haven't reached the punchline yet)).

Then we decided that actually we didn't want container tags, but that paragraphs should have the empty tag "<paragraph_start />" at the beginning, and "<paragraph_end />" at the end. Or even, and this is the funny, unparsable, unmaintainable bit, just empty tags wherever you need them saying stuff like: "<do what="start_paragraph" />". The joke being... the joke being... oh forget it. I'm sorry I even started.