keith said:
>   For $100??? You can be serious!
>   Make that $1000 and I might think about it!

really?  you would think about
going on a wild goose chase
for $1000?  well, ok, so would i.

but how much would it cost
to have you actually _go_
on that wild goose chase,
and not just "think about it"?

$10,000?  $100,000?  or what?

the good news is that, if you want
to code a text-to-html converter,
you can do that _extremely_easily_
if you design a wise format, even if
you are an unskilled coder like i am.

anyway, if you did want to convert
various light-markup formats and
.html, you should check out pandoc,
open-source from john macfarlane.

>   http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

here's the lede from that page:
>   If you need to convert files from
>   one markup format into another,
>   pandoc is your swiss-army knife.
>   Need to generate a man page from
>   a markdown file? No problem.
>   LaTeX to Docbook? Sure.
>   HTML to MediaWiki? Yes, that too.
>   Pandoc can read markdown and
>   (subsets of) reStructuredText, textile,
>   HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write
>   plain text, markdown, reStructuredText,
>   HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF,
>   DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML,
>   ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup,
>   textile, groff man pages, Emacs org-mode,
>   EPUB ebooks, and S5 and Slidy HTML slide shows.
>   PDF output (via LaTeX) is also supported with
>   the included markdown2pdf wrapper script.

whew!  just _reading_ that makes me break out
in a cold sweat and worry about fever dreams...

john macfarlane is a professor of philosophy at
u.c. berkeley, so he can keep all of this straight.
mere mortals should just use pandoc instead...

-bowerbird

p.s.  be forewarned that there are
a half-dozen versions of markdown,
all of them just _slightly_ different...