End of support for Textile in GitHub Pages (Jekyll) 1st May 2016

philwareham · 2016-02-01 21:21:25

Just a note that GitHub are stripping support for Textle (and all but one flavour of Markdown) in GitHub hosted Jekyll sites (aka. GitHub Pages) as of 1st May 2016. This is annoying to me because I’m using that to author the new Textpattern docs site, but not overly surprising since Textile development has all but stopped.

So I’ll have to convert it to Markdown.

Source here

IMHO Textpattern should also move to Markdown as its default syntax in the future (although it is available right now as an optional text filter).

Bloke · 2016-02-01 23:23:44

philwareham wrote #297680:

GitHub are stripping support for Textile… not overly surprising since Textile development has all but stopped.

A shame. I’m not convinced the lack of development is a sound enough reason for them to be dropping it, though. I mean, it’s a markup language. Short of bug fixes, and any new tags that make sense introduced by the W3C, what is there to develop? Making the parser faster maybe? Better regexes? Nothing else really jumps out at me, as it’s a mature product.

From what I can see, Markdown isn’t exactly aggressively developed in terms of new versions springing up like WordPress. And the standardisation process went tits up due to a naming feud, though may still gain traction one day. It’s just that GitHub push it as default so more people use it, which eventually creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of it becoming the dominant system.

IMHO Textpattern should also move to Markdown as its default syntax in the future

I’m not against the idea but don’t find Markdown as fully featured as Textile. Some things I like (backticks for code snippets), others wind me up (the pigging URL syntax for one… is it square brackets then parentheses or the other way round? And the awful 4-space indentation for block code notation irritates me).

ax · 2016-02-02 09:51:08

This is not surprising, because Github’s Textile is the Ruby version of Textile (RedCloth), and this has become incompatible with newer versions of Ruby due to lack of development. A new maintainer for RedCloth is still being sought.

GugUser · 2016-02-02 12:48:06

Bloke wrote #297681:

Nothing else really jumps out at me, as it’s a mature product.

(…)

(…) don’t find Markdown as fully featured as Textile.

I’m totally agree.

philwareham · 2016-02-02 13:20:01

Bloke wrote #297681:

A shame. I’m not convinced the lack of development is a sound enough reason for them to be dropping it, though. I mean, it’s a markup language. Short of bug fixes, and any new tags that make sense introduced by the W3C, what is there to develop? Making the parser faster maybe? Better regexes? Nothing else really jumps out at me, as it’s a mature product.

I imagine GitHub are trying to simplify ongoing Jekyll maintenance – have you seen how many Ruby dependencies are installed when you install Jekyll 2 on a local machine? It’s a lot – each one with the potential to fall over at some point.

Since Markdown is the dominant text markup syntax (even though I personally prefer Textile) I can see why they have made this decision, although it is annoying me somewhat.

Bloke · 2016-02-02 13:41:28

philwareham wrote #297687:

I imagine GitHub are trying to simplify ongoing Jekyll maintenance… I can see why they have made this decision

Absolutely. It makes sense from a maintenance standpoint.

I haven’t seen the Ruby dependencies for it, but last time I tried to install anything Ruby my machine choked.

monkeyninja · 2016-02-02 14:01:50

I noticed this this morning, but am not surprised. As Phil says, it is likely to simplify maintenance of Jekyll. I wonder how long it will be until Textile is no longer supported for Readme files on GitHub?

Does anyone know how widely used Textile is these days beyond the Textpattern community? Other than GitHub and older versions of Basecamp I’ve not really seen it used elsewhere. I have personally implemented it on non-Textpattern projects for use by myself, but suspect it is fairly unheard of by people outside of this community.

I’ve tended to prefer Textile over Markdown, but have started to warm to Markdown for things like Readme files in repositories as the plain text files tend to look more readable in my opinion.

monkeyninja · 2016-02-02 14:06:57

Bloke wrote #297681:

And the awful 4-space indentation for block code notation irritates me).

Can you not also do ```` on the line before and after a block of code? Personally I like the 4-space indentation as it makes the plain text file readable.

philwareham · 2016-02-02 14:12:48

Another benefit of using Markdown is the hundreds of toolbars that are available for it which we could harness, as discussed in this thread and a pet gripe of mine that nothing like that exists in the core of Textpattern. Textile toolbar options are few and far between.

The Redcloth Ruby gem has had a few million downloads in total, so it does have some usage history. It just doesn’t have an active maintainer.

monkeyninja · 2016-02-02 15:30:29

philwareham wrote #297691:

The Redcloth Ruby gem has had a few million downloads in total, so it does have some usage history. It just doesn’t have an active maintainer.

Looking at Packagist netcarver/textile looks reasonably healthy in terms of downloads. Over 3,000 downloads in the last month. I have to admit to finding this a little surprising!

philwareham · 2016-02-02 15:35:40

Just been Tweeting with the guy at GitHub who made the Textile removal decision, it is basically to streamline their offering (which I can’t argue against, really):

twitter.com/benbalter/status/694540915302494209

twitter.com/benbalter/status/694542453311803392

michaelkpate · 2016-02-02 15:49:37

Jekyll supports Markdown out of the box, and has myriad extensions for other formats as well, including the popular Textile format. – Content Formats

So will all of these Converters still be available?

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2016-02-01 21:21:25