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Before Markdown, there was another plain text markup system called Textile, which seems to be all but forgotten -- and I'm not sure "Hamdown" has a lot of advan

Before Markdown, there was another plain text markup system called Textile, which seems to be all but forgotten -- and I'm not sure "Hamdown" has a lot of advantages over Textile, beyond being more familiar to fans of Haml. (Which could be very important for many use cases, of course.) The opening example in Hamdown's readme would look like this in Textile: h1. Main Title h2(f2 helvetica strike). Fancy title *with some bold* Some content I used to prefer Textile to Markdown (and I ran a web site using Textpattern, the CMS designed by Textile's creator, which still has one of the nicer template languages and plugin systems of any system I've used). I eventually gave up and joined the Markdown crowd, and I'm generally happy with it, but in some ways Textile is still superior. It has some aspects of Haml's "HTML but simpler" approach, but Textile still reads more like, well, text in a way that (at least to me) Haml mostly doesn't. https://txstyle.org https://txstyle.org

apocalyptic0n3 8y ago
We use Textile on our Redmine install. It's not terrible, but it always seems like I am writing more markup than should really be necessary
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  It's possible that Textile is a little bit too "middle ground": it's not trying to be a fully semantic markup language like AsciiDoc, but it's not as minimal as Markdown's "cover the common cases as easily as possible and fall back to HTML for everything else" approach, which I suspect is kind of what led Markdown to win. (Also what lets it get away with its "who needs specs" approach that drives some people nuts, of course.) That suggests Hamdown might also be too middle ground, although it'd be more familiar to folks who are already Haml fans. Personally I always found Haml a little off-putting, but I have absolutely no good reason why.
fizx 8y ago
I feel like they were both equally popular in ~2007, but Github-flavored markdown killed Textile.

apocalyptic0n3 8y ago

We use Textile on our Redmine install. It's not terrible, but it always seems like I am writing more markup than should really be necessary

chipotle_coyote 8y ago
It's possible that Textile is a little bit too "middle ground": it's not trying to be a fully semantic markup language like AsciiDoc, but it's not as minimal as Markdown's "cover the common cases as easily as possible and fall back to HTML for everything else" approach, which I suspect is kind of what led Markdown to win. (Also what lets it get away with its "who needs specs" approach that drives some people nuts, of course.) That suggests Hamdown might also be too middle ground, although it'd be more familiar to folks who are already Haml fans. Personally I always found Haml a little off-putting, but I have absolutely no good reason why.

fizx 8y ago

I feel like they were both equally popular in ~2007, but Github-flavored markdown killed Textile.