Now that we have a grasp of some of the concepts that we are going to cover throughout the rest of this book, we are going to start putting them into practice by creating a project that parses a very simple markdown format while the user types into a text area and displays the resulting web page alongside it. Unlike full markdown parsers, we are going to concentrate on formatting the first three header types, the horizontal rule, and paragraphs. The markup is restricted to breaking lines down by newline characters and looking at the start of a line. It then determines whether or not a particular tag is present and, if not, it assumes the current line is a paragraph. The reason we have chosen this implementation is because it is a simple task to pick up immediately. While it is simple, it offers sufficient depth to show that we are going to tackle topics that require us to give real thought to how we will structure the application.

The user interface (UI), uses Bootstrap, and we will look at how to hook up to a change event handler and how to get and update HTML content from the current web page. This is what our project will look like when we have finished:

Now that we have our overview, we can move on to getting started with creating the HTML project.