Markdown puts the Smackdown on Textile (or “Yes, I’m writing titles that turn my own stomach”)

No sooner do “I rediscover Textile”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000488.html for long enough to install it, than I come across “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ which seems to have similar aims:

bq. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

I’ve not really had a chance to dig into it. From a brief-glance, it seems that the text pre-HTML transformation is a bit more natural-looking, particularly for headings, which isn’t suprising, since the creator, John Gruber, says that the formatting conventions used in plain-text e-mail is a big inspiration for the syntax. On the other hand, the link syntax for Textile reads more naturally to me.

I’m not sure whether I’m going to bother with Markdown given that 1) Textile’s been more widely adopted 2)I’m planning on setting up a wiki, and both formats are similar to but different from many of the native Wiki markups — learning 3 and keeping them straight is going to be too much for my little smooth brain to handle.

Some “discussion of Markdown”:http://www.43folders.com/2005/02/in_praise_of_ma.html over on “43Folders”:http://www.43folders.com.

One thought on “Markdown puts the Smackdown on Textile (or “Yes, I’m writing titles that turn my own stomach”)”

  1. Phil Wilson

    Yeah, headings are the only thing Markdown has over Textile as far as I’m concerned.

    I run Textile on all sorts of web and desktop apps I run and in nearly all of them I’ve changed headings to be based on exclamation marks (like the way Markdown uses #). I think the hx. syntax isn’t terribly good.

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