This is a title
===============
You can use *italics* or **bold** or ***both***.
- Lists
- [Links][1]
- etc
[1]: http://foo.net/
You can edit markdown with a real-time preview using WMD, which has been open sourced by stackoverflow.com. For the server-side, the best java implementation I could get my hands on is pegdown.
There are some reasons that make this solution appealing:
- Simple: Thousands of people are contributing to Wikipedia just because this format is much easier than HTML.
- WYSIWYG editor, which is a strong selling point in our case.
- Secure: As long as you are storing the markup instead of the HTML output, you have removed most of the security concerns associated with HTML contents introduced by the user.
- Solid, coherent UI design: You cannot specify your own CSS classes and styles (nobody wants another myspace :)
In our case we replaced a bunch of fields in a domain object (three url attributes, two phone numbers, description, etc) with a single Markdown description. That's it.
Markdown is well-known in the Rails community (mostly located on GitHub), but Java developers are disseminated between java.net, google code, sourceforge and whatnot. I suppose this is the reason why these technologies are taking some time to root, which is a pity because there are lots of things in the Rails world that could make a difference also for Java.
