I have been tinkering with the proposed markup changes a bit more and
have come to the conclusion it is a good more to make...

We eliminate 8 markup rules (which should speed processing) and we
added new functionality (now we have ##box## and @@monospace@@).  I
also tweaked the code to allow >>>>>>very small>> and <<<<<<<very
large<< based on the number of leading symbols. Kind of fun...

I also wrote a fix.php script, similar to ones in the past that will
automatically update your existing pages to use the new markup, more
or less. (It flags code pages for manual inspection, to avoid conflict
with stuff like <!-- in your css or js pages).  It was a little tricky
to get the translations right because it involves, --, ---, and ----.
And you can only run it once on a page, as it will break things if you
run it on a page twice. So the fixer script generates a complete list
of all your pages in your site and then fixes them 100 pages at a time
(to prevent timeouts), then drops them from the list. So with a few
quick refreshes you are done, and no chance of double processing a
page.

I've been testing it on my sites and so far no surprizes. Of course, I
realize now the conversion is not readily reversible... So I guess I'm
committed. We could customize the function to accept old (+/-) and new
markup (</>) simultaneously (easy enough) if any object to the change,
but with the automatic converter, I hope it will only be a minor
inconvenience. The benefits are

1) improved performance (not benchmarked)
2) simpler, yet more robust code (## and @@)
3) fun really big and really small font capabilities
4) no conflicts with people using -- for a dash (no need for ---)
5) and it keeps the same kind of semantic sense we're used to

One interesting thing... To get the really big and really small
font-size to work dynamically like this, I had to use <span
style='font-size: 130%'>text</span> rather than <span
class=large>text</span> so any custom styling for the ++/-- (now
<</>>) will be lost. Makes skin development easier, but not quite as
flexible--as the behavior is more hardcoded.

Ok, I'm still tinkering. Have a few other changes I want to make for
the next release, so I won't put this out anytime soon, but just want
to keep you posted and solicit feedback. Esp as this could affect a
lot of sites...

Cheers,
Dan

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