Essmark Rewrite

15 August, 2026 Essmark Rewrite I decided to share my writing and stop keeping it to myself. An RSS feed seemed like a simple enough way to achieve that, but as with most simple ideas I have, it was anything but. Making any RSS or Atom document is easy; I had that done in no time, but after trying out a few RSS readers it became obvious that it doesn't work well unless you're distributing HTML. Linking out to a PDF or plaintext version of the document severely broke the reading experience. I wrote essmark primarily to produce Tagged Text for importing plain-text into InDesign. I always knew that I'd eventually expand it to generate HTML output so built it with that in mind but it still wasn't easy. The first version of the parser used GNU Awk. It was fairly well suited to the problem given it's line-orientated and that essmark barely ever leaks formatting requirements beyond its current line. I didn't like the way it handled global replacements. They were often too greedy when…