Editing Curl (programming language) (section)

== As lightweight markup ==
Because Curl provides for both user-defined text procedures and [[Style sheet (web development)|style sheets]], it can be used readily as [[Domain-specific language|domain-specific]] lightweight markup. A major advantage over plain text HTML markup is that the text encoding can be set to [[UTF-8]], and text entered in a [[Unicode]]-enabled [[text editor]] with no [[Escape character|escaping of characters]] (like JavaScript, Curl is Unicode friendly). A [[poetry]] example is:

<syntaxhighlight lang="text">
 {poem || wraps entire poem
    {stanza  || first verse here in any language
    }
    {stanza  || another verse here in any language
    }
 }
</syntaxhighlight>

which can initially be implemented by defining the poem and stanza markup as paragraph text formats. Stanza could be further refined to include a hidden navigation anchor for page navigation using the Curl {destination} which is itself a text procedure.

The same markup can be used for different results, as one can style text to be visible in one context and invisible in another. Curl also permits top-level file inclusion so that a source text in markup can be included in different parent files. In education, for example, one could create a source file of test questions, and include it in both a student and a teacher version of the text.