Haha, yes, as I was finishing writing the parser, I stumbled upon Fountain and realized my genius idea for a markdown based playwriting format was not so original. Ended up adding some Fountain syntax to my parser and ultimately I built a very functional but not feature complete implementation of Fountain by accident.

I built sharing and (sort of) versioning into the web app. Everything is saved in localStorage and on a MySQL server. You can Save or Save As, and every time you Save As it inserts a new database row and gives you a new, sharable URL.

I wanted an experience where you didn't have to login to use it, but ultimately, having a way to keep track of all those URLs would actually be a pretty decent versioning system--add diff checking between script versions and you end up with something pretty handy.

XML is a good candidate, but actually overkill for the purposes I was looking to achieve. Basically, all I needed was character names are all caps, scene headings have hashes, and stage directions are free text. Put a handful of other niceties like title pages, casts, and page breaks, but never anything so complex it needed additional markup.

# INT. JOE'S BEDROOM, DAY.

JOE

This is my dialogue, yeehaw.

JOE exits, and we know JOE is exiting because this is a stage direction, and we know this is a stage direction because it is free text and doesn't satisfy any other formatting requirement.