what is the best way to mark any text?

Question

I need users to mark some section of text with custom tags, I can't use the xml based tags as the whole text will be embedded in XML documents and all the < will be converted to html escape code <. I want users to marks some section of text with tags like skip, bookmark, these tags can have attributes also like bookmark name="first". Which is the best way of allowing users to mark text using the BB forum way like [b]abcd[/b] or using {{bookmark name="first"}}. Or is there any better scheme or technique available.

I don't want to change the structure of the text as down by the markdown or textile, I just want to tag some section of text, like the phpBB tags. The question is there any other style than phpBB? Like in some software I see {{bookmark name = "abcd"}} style.

Answer 1

You can have a look at the Textile markup language to see if it fits your needs. It has many implementations and nice documentation.

Answer 2

The three common markups I know of for this purpose are Markdown (used, I believe, by SO), textile, and BBCode. The first two are commonly used for blog sites and CMS frameworks, and BBCode I think is usually associated with bulletin-board sites. Preview and mapping utilities are available for each.