Question

I’m finding some editors that say they use bbcode or markdown or wiki, etc.

Can someone explain what this is all about?

Answer 1

It’s a simplified set of mark-up language tags to help with formatting of content in situations where you do not trust the data being entered, it will prevent users having to enter direct html that may otherwise break a page or permit exploits from working their way into the page’s output. These tags will be processed and formatted into HTML by the software.

Typing this answer into Stackoverflow required me to use a form of markup/markdown language 🙂

eg

[b]Bold[/b]
[url=http://www.google.com]Link Text[/url]
[img]http://www.domain.com/image.jpg[/img]

For wikipedia entries on each type of markup:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown