Writing with Markdown
John Gruber, author of [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown) has been working with me behind the scenes to come up with an appropriate version of Markdown for Radio UserLand webloggers. We concluded months ago that a UserTalk port of the Markdown Perl script was in order. [Marc Barrot](http://radio.weblogs.com/0104487/) of [activeRenderer](http://activerenderer.com/) fame has spent the last three weeks doing the port in his spare time -- no small feat considering he's a new father, too.
I installed the private beta tool today and it's wonderful. The port is a work of UserTalk art following the spirit of John's Perl script beautifully. We need to add a web interface for prefs and some links back to John's site for help with the syntax and more.
That reminds me: John, can you make the syntax available as an XML file, too? That would allow a developer to easily include the current syntax information by having the app pull the XML and parse it for the user.