| 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".
                          
                         
                          
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