Lightweight Markup Language for Icons

Lightweight markup languages are very convenient for hyperlinks 开发者_运维技巧and images. But what I am looking for is a language that would help users display icons or smileys on a page (for example on a dashboard).

For example, "flag:red" would display... a red flag. "Light:green" would display a green traffic light. The icons could come from an image library, unicode symbols, or maybe a graphic library.

Does such a language exist?

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Github implemented something similar to this for their markup. You'd write :cake: and get this (in scale with the rest of the text, mind you):

Unfortunately, the implementation is not open-source. However, your idea works great. Implement a simple parser in your language of choice, come up with a rigid syntax and an image library, and go to town!

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You could do it with reStructuredText by adding some "custom interpreted text roles" but if all you want to do it choose icons, you're probably better off with a custom "domain specific language". How you'd do it is very dependent on the environment you want to use though.