I made some more tweaks to the demo program; it now supports a “mixed” mode—you can type in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags, but the system will add <P> tags if you leave a blank line between paragraphs (in fact, it was only five lines of C code—easier than I thought).
There's still one bug and it has to deal with HTML entity encoding (and mostly with populating the <TEXTAREA> with the text that was submitted). Type “&” (which is the HTML entity for a lone “&”) then submit the data. The <TEXTAREA> will come back with a lone “&” where you typed “&” before. Basically, to display “&” you need to display “&amp;” (and to display that I had to type “&amp;amp;”—I think I got the right number of “amp;s”).
Ow—my brain hurts (and if the above is incorrect, I'm not bothering to fix it—which goes to show you how nasty this little problem is).
Oh, the demo program—it also supports a few shortcuts, like “---” (three dashes in a row) will be converted to “—” (the em-dash, and the code that processes entries for this blog will do the same, so check the source if you want to see how I got around that—geeze, this sef-referential stuff will kill me!) and “...” (three periods) will be converted to “…” (elipsis—it's own character); some short-cuts like that (and these shortcuts happen in any of the modes by the way).
Okay, I'm going to lie down now.
The demo program has long since been deleted. This entry can be safely ignored.