Descriptions are displayed as text only (no markup)

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At the pentaho meetup 2010, a lot of people expressed interest in some way to 
use markup in the description fields. Currently, the xslt stylesheet simply 
echoes the text entered in these fields as-is in the HTML document. 

I think this is a very good idea. To implement it, I think it would be good to 
have a bit of discussion from interested (potential) users so we can all decide 
what features should be supported and how to denote it. 

From the comments I received at the meetup, two different kinds/purposes of 
markup were mentioned:

1) Julian Hyde was asking about at-tags (@tags) like you have in javadoc. This 
is basically a form of semantic markup that lets you do crossreferences etc. 
See 
[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/index-137868.html#t
ag] for the JavaDoc @tags.

2) Various people mentioned the ability to include existing documents

3) links to external documents were mentioned

4) embedding pictures was mentioned too.

Personally, I think that supporting something like MediaWiki markup (see 
[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting]), textile 
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_(markup_language)]) or markdown 
([http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax]) would solve points 2,3, 
and 4. I am open to other suggestions though. 

As for the @tags, it might be good to do an analysis to see to what extent the 
same functionality can be obtained by whichever markup language we choose to 
solve points 2,3,4. I realize that the @tags are semantic in nature (not 
stylistic) so on the one hand it seems reasonable to support this separately. 
On the other hand, there are a bunch of well-understood conventions to do stuff 
like cross-references using mediawiki markup, and I would like to duplicate as 
little functionality as possible.

If you have any requirements, suggestions or ideas, please add a comment to 
this issue. After there is a little more input on this matter, we can all look 
into a planning to implement this. 

Original issue reported on code.google.com by roland.bouman on 27 Sep 2010 at 8:46