Who invented zen coding and is there a published specification somewhere ?

Question

Background:

"Zen coding" is apparently the name of a style of text-entry in an IDE or editor whereby the user can type small abbreviations that are expanded into HTML. This is not necessarily a new idea, just an elaboration on an old one that many editors support.

The nice thing about it is that the manual entry takes on an aspect of interactive programming. To understand what I mean, watch this screencast:

http://pepelsbey.net/pro/2008/08/zen-html/

Questions:

• Who invented this?
• Are there multiple "standards" or "specifications" out there for someone who might want to implement this in their own editor/IDE/product?
• Is this convention similar to the convention for "Wiki markup" where there are multiple variants all over the place and some undocumented?

Answer 1

The project home page is at http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/.

This has all the people involved, the features, supported editors, and so on for the project to build plugins for the supported IDEs.

The 'inventor' is serge.che, his announcement was on Aptana and a realy good writeup and video on the topic is available at http://jyoseph.com/zen-coding-how-to-install-Aptana-Eclipse/ - good luck1

Answer 2

I have just made a Visual Studio AddIn for ZenCoding. I just used the original python library with IronPython and some wrapper classes. The process is documented (and the addin can be downloaded) at: http://tech.einaregilsson.com/2009/11/12/zen-coding-visual-studio-addin/

I think that as far as possible you should try to use the original library and just develop the add-ins for each IDE/editor seperately. You can then use CPython, Jython or IronPython to run the library, depending on which IDE you are trying to integrate with.