Markdown & Textile

[apeisa]

Thinking about to use one of those in Discussions module (or maybe both). Interested to hear about main differencies:

Which one has friendlier syntax and why?

What kind of editors are available for both?

Why markdown seems to be more popular?

Having @netcarver on Textile camp is huge plus for that side, but since I am pretty much newbie on this I figured I ask before I go any further.

[diogo]

I started by using Markdown but switched to Textile after using it. I think it just feels less criptic and friendlier to editors. One main thing that I prefer in Textile over Markdown is how they handle new lines.

markitUp works with both. And you can even use it's examples to checkout the differences

http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/examples/textile/

http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/examples/markdown/

Indeed, having netcarver here is a big plus in favor of Textile

[netcarver]

Thanks guys, I've actually been working a lot on textile recently and want to push some big changes to the code soon.

In the meantime Antti, if you do go down the textile route, then you probably want to use the TextileRestricted() method as this is meant to deal with input that's coming from untrusted sources such as public comments. The normal mode in textile supports a far wider range of features.

[MarcC]

Markdown reads a bit friendlier to me. I think that's part of the reason why it's more popular. Textile uses h1. Headline for an h1, and Markdown uses # Headline #.

With that said, I prefer using Textile because of its features and it hasn't fragmented the way the Markdown offerings have.

[Adam Kiss]

Textile has support for much broader spectrum of features, like classes, ids, tables, and that is a huge plus.

Markdown has support. And that's even bigger plus, e.g. there is probably around 200x more text editors for MD, rather than Tx. All the cool kids play with MD

[apeisa]

For the quick look the textile headings don't make much sense to me. They don't look like headings at all, and if you don't know html tags, then they are just confusing. Although I am pretty sure that in this case I don't need headings at all. Other than that, I do like the syntax a bit more. *bold* > **bold** etc, although they are pretty similar.

[ryan]

I recently switched a client from Markdown to Textile and they are a lot happier with Textile. There were a few problems with Markdown that nobody could ever get used to:

1. Two-spaces-at-end-of-line thing that you have to do with Markdown when you want to go to the next line. Forget the two spaces and your two lines become 1 line in the rendered output. This makes sense in the context of HTML, but makes little sense to non developers. The client of course knew how to do it, but because spaces are invisible it was a recurring problem in this case due to the nature of the content. This is often one that's difficult to explain and difficult to remember, especially due to the lack of visual cues.

2. Numbered lists (like this) where Markdown comes up with its own numbers regardless of what number you specify. It meant them having to make numbered lists like 1), 2), etc. in order to be in control, which was not their preference.

3. Bulleted lists not working unless preceded and followed by a blank line. This is a hard one for some people to remember for some reason. Though I've never found it to be an issue myself.

I also think it's a little disappointing that there doesn't seem to be an equivalent of TextileRestricted for Markdown. Clearly they are out there (as GitHub uses one for their comments, maybe homebrewed), but I've not come across them.

Antti you might also consider BBCode which has broad recognition as a result of being a standard in forums for a long time. This is an alternative to TextileRestricted which is safe to use with user input (and we have a PW module for it). I used it with the modules directory because I thought our users might be more familiar with it since we used it a lot in SMF. Though now thinking TextileRestricted (or providing a choice) may be a better solution going forward.

[yellowled]

As to why Markdown is so popular: I think it's got a lot to do with GitHub using Markdown. GitHub is so incredibly popular among web developers that you almost have to know Markdown. Also, iA Writer uses Markdown, and that's a pretty popular Mac/iOS app.

It also tends to (but that might be just my impression) be a bit more robust towards irritations in the syntax than Textile. For example, you can easily produce markup errors in Textile by using emoticons with “noses” in Textile. I have never experienced those in Markdown. Again, this might be a rather personal experience.

[netcarver]

@yellowled,

feel free to open issues for bugs, problems or feature requests over on the textile repo on github.

[diogo]

Should the markdown module support the github flavoured syntax as an option? (mainly new lines to br and code blocks)

Seems to me that it would be a matter of adding one class to the module, based on this module for wordpress:

https://github.com/evansolomon/wp-github-flavored-markdown-comments/blob/master/github-flavored-markdown-comments.php

[Manaus]

I vastly prefer Textile over Markdown: the *thing* appears as _this_ and **this** is different from *this*...

What's more, on Italian keyboards you don't have the ` sign. I'm wondering what about French, Spanish etc.

Pros in textile are bold, italic, links notation, and so many other things.

Cons is titles, I agree, and popularity.

[Martijn Geerts]

<qoute>What's more, on Italian keyboards you don't have the ` sign.<quote>

You must hate MODX then

[pwired]

Interested to hear about main differencies:

http://www.elated.com/articles/textile-markdown-nice-alternatives-to-wysiwyg-editors/