The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, September 25, 2025

This is my markup language. There are plenty of others, but this is mine

The Lobster's Blog Carnival is up, and the theme is “What have you made for yourself?” While I have plenty of programs I wrote, there's one that I specifically wrote for my own use: MOPML.

I wrote it to make writing blog entries easier for me. For twenty years, I was hand-crafting HTML for each entry and I finally got tired of it. I wanted an easier way to make entries, so I started down the path of implementing my own markup language. Existing languages like Markdown or AsciiDOC didn't appeal to me and were a bit too generic in how they did things. I also wanted to steal ideas from TeX and Org Mode, as well as some ideas I had to support tags like <ABBR> (which not many sites bother doing).

As I already had twenty years of entries in HTML, one design goal was not to store the entries as MOPML, but to keep them their final HTML-rendered state. This meant that I could play around with the syntax of MOPML and not have to worry about breaking existing entries. Besides, if I had to edit a post after publication, I can edit the HTML directly; I have been doing that for years anyway. For the impementation, I chose Lua, specifically so I could use LPEG.

The TeX inpsired syntax are for items like M-dashes, where I can type three dashes like --- and get a single M-dash on output: —. Or even type typographical quotes where I can type ``This is quoted'' and get “This is quoted”. I even extended that so that when I type “1/2” I get “½”. It's also easy to add new entries to the particular parsing rule.

And while I was inpired by Org Mode for things such as tables and block quotes, I did not care for the syntax, so I changed it to suit my needs. A table is easy to generate:

#+table This is a caption
*header	foo	bar	baz
**footer	foo	bar	baz
Entry 1	3	14	15
Entry 2	92	62	82
Entry 3	8	-1	4
#-table

The #+table starts a table defintion, and is followed by an optional caption. A header row is marked by a starting asterisk, and a footer row is marked by two asterisks. Each field is separated by a tab character. The above example will produce the following table:

This is a caption
header foo bar baz
footer foo bar baz
Entry 1 3 14 15
Entry 2 92 62 82
Entry 3 8 -1 4

The above sample is yet another Org Mode inspried block:

#+source MOPML
#+table This is a caption
*header	foo	bar	baz
**footer	foo	bar	baz
Entry 1	3	14	15
Entry 2	92	62	82
Entry 3	8	-1	4
#-table
#-source

(For the record, I did have to go in after rendering this post and fix the above example, but I never intended to nest #+source blocks in the first place.)

I also have a defined block for when I quote email:

#+email
From: John Doe <{{johndoe@example.net}}>
To: sean@conman.org
Subject: Re: Morbi in lorem ut lectus accumsan
        placerat. Morbi TLA enim id turpis
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 18:12:41 +0200

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.  Donec gravida
justo et aliquam lobortis.

#-email

The From: header has another formatting quirk—the {{ and }} denote text that is to be censored in the output. This is how I get those XXXXX­XX censor bars in my posts. The above will render the block as:

From
John Doe <XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXX>
To
sean@conman.org
Subject
Re: Morbi in lorem ut lectus accumsan placerat. Morbi TLA enim id turpis
Date
Mon, 1 Apr 2019 18:12:41 +0200

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec gravida justo et aliquam lobortis.

The Markdown-inspried bits are mostly with inline markup, such as *emphasis* for emphasis, and `code` for code. I never did like the Markdown or Org Mode syntax for links, so I played around with it for quite a bit until I got a syntax I like. So when I want to link to this page, I type {^https://www.conman.org/people/spc/about/ this page}. It's a minimal syntax that isn't likely to appear in normal text. And if I ever do want to include a “}” in a link, I can always escape it like {^/ sample \} text} to get sample } text.

But I think the best feature is how I handle abbreviations. HTML contans the <ABBR> tag to semantically mark up TLAs and what not. I wish most web authors would do this, as it would make reading about the MPZ easier to understand, and most browsers on the market will show a tooltip with the TITLE attribute if you hover over it.

I was moaning about this way back in 2003, and I finally have a method I'm happy with. All I do is include a block of abbreviations at the top of the post:

abbr:	HTML	HyperText Markup Language
	MOPML	My Own Private Markup Language
	LPEG	Lua Parsing Expression Grammar
	URL	Uniform Resource Locator
	TLS	Three Letter Acronyms
	MPZ	Medial Palisade Zone

The code will read this block and generate the LPEG code to recognize the acronym, such as TLA, and generate the appropriate HTML: <abbr title="Three Letter Acronym">TLA</abbr>, thus giving us our TLA with semantic markup.

I even solved what I called the IRA problem back in 2003, you know, when the IRA steals the IRAs from members of the IRA; or in other words, when you have the same TLA that maps to different meanings. And I can even mention IRA GERSHWIN without fear of it becoming Initial Risk Assessment GERSHWIN. The IRA problem is solved with yet another block definition at the top of the post:

abbr2:	IRAa	IRA	Irish Republican Army
	IRAr	IRA	International Reading Association
	IRAm	IRA	Individual Retirement Account

So I type IRAa and the code will generate <abbr title="Irish Republican Army">IRA</abbr>.

I suppose I could always include definitions of common TLAs I use in the code itself, but it hasn't been that big of an issue for me to just define the TLAs I use in the post itself.

That's pretty much all I have for a markup language. Yes, it's tailored to what I write and how I want to present it. I don't expect anyone to use this engine as it makes sense to me, but maybe not to you. And that's the point, this is for me to use. I made this for myself. And I'm lucky enough to be able to do so.

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No AI was used in the making of this site, unless otherwise noted.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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