[textile] Textile vs. Markdown

milkshake · 2007-07-12 19:25:24

Is it on the cards that Textile will be phased out in favor of Markdown?

I came across this reference from wet, which set me wondering…

(Textpattern 4.1.0 will probably be the first version supporting native Markdown notation, so I’m a little ahead of time for this). Source

wet · 2007-07-13 06:08:38

Not at all, or at least only over my dead body! But Textpattern will gain capabilities to support additional markup languages besides Textile, Markdown being one of them.

Nic · 2007-07-13 16:40:28

This might be a bit of a silly question, but in what way? Textpattern already does support Markdown to some degree (albeit renaming the file to classTextile). Would it just be abstracting the file name?

I guess I’m thinking more surface here; I’m sure the technical explanation of supporting other markup languages would make my head spin.

Mary · 2007-07-14 03:20:11

Textile will be phased out in favor of Markdown?

Not at all, or at least only over my dead body!

Upgrade that to “never” (I plan on being immortal). ;p

Nic, it will be a kind of “built-in”, supported thing, where you could have articles using an unlimited amount of different markup languages, all you would need is a kind of ‘wrapper’ for it that Textpattern understands. Once the base functionality is available (it is already written, but is in crockery), people will be able to add and distribute their own markup types.

candyman · 2014-08-31 16:52:32

Many (many) years ago I was interested on Txp even for his markup language: Textile was (is) really impressive.
Anyway to many friends of mine it seemed not so interesting and so they asked to use the BBcode that they were using on the forum.

Today I see that Markdown (that, when I saw it for the first time, seemed to me just a dialect of Textile) is widely used on many CMS.

So a question: why Markdown had the success that Textile deserved to have?

colak · 2014-08-31 18:12:15

candyman wrote #283381:

So a question: why Markdown had the success that Textile deserved to have?

google uses a flavor of textile so it’s not that unsuccessful. But to respond to your question, I guess that the events at joyent and textdrive2 did a lot of damage to both txp and textile.

michaelkpate · 2014-08-31 19:57:19

candyman wrote #283381:

So a question: why Markdown had the success that Textile deserved to have?

Great Man Theory.

Markdown was the creation of Jon Gruber, who was (and is) immensely popular among Apple Fanboys. In the early days of Textile and Textpattern, Dean wasn’t quite as popular but he did have a genuine following.

“But Dean Allen began to fade away. He wasn’t an infocide, but for several years it was as if he were on infohospice.” – Resurrecting Mark Pilgrim and Why the Lucky Stiff

You would think that the technology would sink or swim on it’s own but that isn’t what happened. Markdown has had a kind of constant low-level marketing campaign that has really paid off.

bici · 2014-09-01 00:30:52

michaelkpate wrote #283387:

Great Man Theory.

well these days Allen seems to be on Elba, while Gruber writes and twitter every day.

as for preferring Textile over Markdown. I really don’t fancy either.

michaelkpate · 2014-09-09 19:30:44

Anyone been following the Markdown Kerfuffle going on today?

A group of Markdown enthusiasts have been working on writing up a complete standard for Markdown. After several attempts to reach Jon Gruber where he did his best Dean and totally ignored them, they chose a name for their project: Standard Markdown. At that point, Gruber pops up and accuses them of trying to steal his creation or something.

So Standard Markdown is now CommonMark

And Gruber shows himself to be a big baby… well, actually, anyone who prefers Android to iOS knew that already.

p.s. If this is giving you a sense of Déjà vu, you may remember the whole RSS/Dave Winer fight that resulted in Atom.

bici · 2014-09-10 02:35:52

michaelkpate wrote #283609:

And Gruber shows himself to be a big baby… well, actually, anyone who prefers Android to iOS knew that already.

Are you sure? … i thought Gruber was a big Fan of iOS

michaelkpate · 2014-09-10 03:28:11

bici wrote #283613:

Are you sure? … i thought Gruber was a big Fan of iOS

That is what I meant. Remember I called him Apple’s biggest Fanboy in the earlier comment.

“But recently, my sense has changed. I hadn’t been able crisply describe any single bit of writing that was obviously problematic, but as a whole, his defenses and promotion of Apple have seemed more zealous. I no longer feel like I am listening to someone who I can get the straight scoop from. I am starting to feel like he is devolving into a pure Apple partisan.” – John Gruber jumps the shark

jdueck · 2014-09-24 18:43:23

Personally I think Markdown succeeded mostly on its merits. Unprocessed markdown documents are very readable. Textile is basically HTML shorthand, whereas the basic MD feature set aims to be human-friendly. (especially regarding headings, numbered lists, etc.)

I say this as a Textpattern user since the very beginning, I was a big fan of Textile. But Markdown just looks better. If I had my way tomorrow every Textile implementation and document would be magically converted to Markdown. 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.)

Last edited by jdueck (2014-09-24 18:51:48)

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)

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#1 2007-07-12 19:25:24