Do the same thing that most wikis use and create a new notation with well defined rules. Then convert that to HTML. Assuming your new notation is well designed that would be the end of the problem. HTML is not suited to this as it has too many edge cases where things can happen that you may not anticipate, and filtering those constructs out is difficult if you intend to allow some of them to pass through, requiring you to handle parsing html, which is expensive.

Also if go with HTML-like markup you need to consider carefully where you handle task like filtering. Putting on the submit has different ramifications from putting at the fetch.

---
demerphq


In reply to Re: Pondering Portals by demerphq
in thread Pondering Portals by hacker

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.