[textile] Textile vs. Markdown

jdueck · 2014-09-24 18:48:16

Here’s my question though. We had almost the identical situation with Textile. It was forked and extended by people who were not Dean Allen. From what it looked like to me, Alex (zem) made his own “official” Textile 2.0 and put up a website and dingus and everything. How exactly did that go down? This would have been in 2006 or so. Then it happened again in 2010 with Stef and Steve’s (net-carver) work on Textile 2.2.

Did anyone in either case inquire about Dean’s opinion of this, or hear from him at all?

I wrote a piece a bit ago called Vulgar Markdown, just my own opinion¹ about this brouhaha. I’m preparing an addendum, and part of that is wondering if there’s any way in which Textile’s history could be instructive.

¹ fwiw my opinion is that Gruber is being ridiculous.

candyman · 2014-09-24 19:06:21

Believe or not, I was tryin’ to remember the site where I read that Textile was safer (HTML filterning is not necessary) than Markdown… and was yours! This scared me a bit :|

Textile actually is 2.4 according to Wikipedia (but I read a 3.5.5 at the bottom of the page) :\|

Last edited by candyman (2014-09-24 19:17:03)

GugUser · 2014-09-24 19:56:21

In my opinion Textile is better than Markdown. It’s easy to me to remember what *strong (bold)* or _em (italic)_ is. Or h4. Title is to detect visually faster than #### Title. Or, how you made a definition list with Markdown or a span with a class etc.?

Last edited by GugUser (2014-09-24 20:00:13)

candyman · 2014-09-24 20:17:10

Many switched from Textile to Markdown (and they are using TXP!).
I’m curious about the real advantage in doing this: maybe is just becaus Markdown is getting more popular.

Anyway, Textile2 vs. MultiMarkdown

michaelkpate · 2014-09-25 02:19:36

jdueck wrote #284163:

Personally I think Markdown succeeded mostly on its merits. Unprocessed markdown documents are very readable.

At this point, I have been using Textile for so long I really don’t feel qualified to judge but I found this quote amusing from the article Candyman linked to.

Generally, Markdown is bit more cryptic but more powerful, while Textile is simpler and easier to read. Textile is meant to be combined with HTML for more complex documents.

Oh, and I do agree with this:

It really has nothing to do with Great Man Gruber. (In fact as many have noted, apart from his having initially made and named Markdown, it’s really succeeded in spite of Gruber, not because of him.)

Mainly I was thinking of all the people who visited his blog and got exposed to Markdown over the years. It probably had more to do with Github and Stack Overflow than anything else.

Bloke · 2014-09-25 08:29:20

jdueck wrote #284164:

Did anyone in either case inquire about Dean’s opinion of this, or hear from him at all?

Very few are blessed with a response from Dean, sadly.

Work on 2.2 and higher is based on Alex’s implementation, which was the version embedded in Textpattern at the time it was extended and had the long-standing bugs fixed. Once on Github, the features have flourished to the extent that the Textile2 vs MultiMarkdown document that candyman linked to is rather out-of-date. Auto-hyperlinking and named footnotes being the main additions, along with fixes for some of the other niggles mentioned.

Textile’s Parser still bears Dean’s name as owner and copyright holder, with additional influences, fixes and extensions noted.

The confusion over version numbers is simply because the 3.x branch is a multi-file implementation using an autoloader which Txp doesn’t have in its 4.5.x codebase. Under 4.6.0 we do have an autoloader, so we can hopefully move towards embedding the 3.x Textile at some point, instead of the feature-frozen 2.x branch.

michaelkpate · 2014-09-25 14:47:35

An interesting history – wrong, but interesting…

there already is a generic term — “light-markup”.

(some, like wikipedia, use “lightweight”, but that implies that it’s deficient, incomplete, or lacking, which is true of some variants, but not others.)

another generic, coined by one of the pioneers, dean allen, who did textile, is “humane markup”.

textile was the light-markup in “movable type”, the early blogging system that john gruber used, so gruber actually “borrowed” the idea from allen, a little nugget that he’s only rarely acknowledged.

to gruber’s credit, however, he gave his version a new name, and thus deserves full kudos for the popularity that markdown has received ever since.

- What should we promote as the “generic” term for Markdown/CommonMark-like markup languages?

ax · 2014-09-25 16:11:12

michaelkpate wrote #284193:

An interesting history – wrong, but interesting…

A little history, then. “In the beginning, there was Textile” as Gruber noted in 2003. Already in 2003 Textile was received very well, see here or there. And it was only nine months later, that Aaron Swartz announced Markdown. Swartz (yes the Aaron Swartz, and then only 17 years of age) was the co-creator of Markdown, and stated in his blog that Markdown was “spurred by my frustration with the existing ‘simple’ tools – reStructuredText, Textile, etc.”.

Last edited by ax (2014-09-25 16:42:02)

michaelkpate · 2014-09-25 16:43:34

ax wrote #284194:

A little history, then. “In the beginning, there was Textile” as Gruber noted in 2003.

I had forgotten how far apart Textile and Markdown were introduced.

For years I’ve been trying to imagine a bulletproof web-based plaintext-to-HTML system, one that respects typographic standards and the correct presentation of non-standard characters, as well as structured markup, without the writer having to think (or having to have learned) very much about it. Ideally such a system would mimic the functions in the web writing Applescripts available from this site, which were created with the same ideal in mind; those scripts make writing text for the web a snap, but only for those working on the Mac platform, and, as the scripts require a standalone application to run, they impose what feels like an unnecessary third step in between writing and publishing. Ideally, one should be able to write, hit send, and be done…So I’ve come up with Textile, a humane web text generator. – Textile, Dean Allen, December 2, 2002

Textile is a ‘Humane Web Text Generator,’ created by Dean Allen of Textism. After seeing Textile in action, I decided that I must create a Movable Type plugin that does the same thing. – MT-Textile, Brad Choate, February 13, 2003

The synopsis I quoted above made it sound like Textile was developed specifically for MT which wasn’t the case at all.

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#13 2014-09-24 18:48:16

Re: [textile] Textile vs. Markdown

#14 2014-09-24 19:06:21

Re: [textile] Textile vs. Markdown

#15 2014-09-24 19:56:21

Re: [textile] Textile vs. Markdown

#16 2014-09-24 20:17:10

Re: [textile] Textile vs. Markdown

#17 2014-09-25 02:19:36

Re: [textile] Textile vs. Markdown

jdueck wrote #284163:

#18 2014-09-25 08:29:20

Re: [textile] Textile vs. Markdown

jdueck wrote #284164:

#19 2014-09-25 14:47:35

Re: [textile] Textile vs. Markdown

#20 2014-09-25 16:11:12

Re: [textile] Textile vs. Markdown

michaelkpate wrote #284193:

#21 2014-09-25 16:43:34

Re: [textile] Textile vs. Markdown

ax wrote #284194:

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