[podwiki] Unifying output of POD and other markup methods

[David A. B. <Br...@ac...>]

Tom,

I've been thinking for a while about the behavior of the different formatters. 
What got me started on this is the fact that we have two different pieces of 
code to produce links, one for POD and one for the other formatters. They 
can't be combined due to the behavior of the non-POD formatters. POD first 
parses everything into a tree and then runs through the tree, "print"ing every 
node in the tree. The other formatters, however, do a "search and replace" 
style of formatting within the input text. After everything is formatted, then 
they print (some doing minimal post-processing to form paragraphs).

What if both forms were changed to, instead of printing (either as-they-go or 
at the tail end), simply return a string. The strings can be accumulated as 
the processing continues and then printed at the end of Runner::run.

This would be a pretty big change, so I thought I'd run it by you first. What 
do you think?

-- 
David A. Bright
Br...@ac...
dab...@us...