10 ms·

Textile Markup Language

67 points by john-doe 5y ago

ogennadi 5y ago
TIL that Atlassian's Confluence (used at big corps for internal documentation) uses Textile, or something similar, for their text editor. https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-wiki-markup-251003035.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-wiki-markup-...
geraldbauer 5y ago
May I introduce Texti (Markup Language) - Text with Instructions (.texti) - Structured Documents in Text with Formatting Conventions - that tries to offer the best of all worlds - that is - markdown / textile / mediawiki markup/down / latex and more. See https://texti.github.io https://texti.github.io PS: An "important" building block missing in markdown / textile is built-in templates a la mediawiki markup/down. Lets you add "macros" for images or figures and so on (and much more). Extension and evolution is key - as always - and wins out in the long run.
- wavesplash 5y ago
  a) awesome. b) please increase the default font size of that doc. c) please consider moving the exposition to the end and just jump into the good stuff about how it works and what's different. Perhaps a short intro like "Texti is modern markup. Think Markdown and Wikimedia markup had a baby. Here's how to do all the things..."
  - geraldbauer 5y ago
    Thanks. Note this text is not a commercial or ad. My philosophy is function over form wins. Period. Comments and critique always welcome. If I may return the favor - do NOT use the word modern - as in say 5 or 10 years - that may read different. Do NOT upcase markdown - it is today a generic term / word. The had a baby "idea" is stupid. The idea is about evolution and adding AND yes, deleting and forever changing and so on. Anyways, here's the source (w/ public domain - no rights reserved dedication) - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/texti/texti.github.io/master/README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/texti/texti.github.io/mast... you are more than welcome to publish your own teaser / promo / analysis / opinion.
- sprucevoid 5y ago
  To me that page is very confusing. Feels like I'm reading a single person's private brainstorm notes rather than a documentation.
  - geraldbauer 5y ago
    FYI: New ideas first presented are always very confusing. Let it sink in. Note: The page is public - thus, if I may return the favor - change the confusing private to public in your sentence (or is that "knee jerk private commentary?"). PS: Let me add more context - The top-linked Textile Markup Language is a documentation website. Textile markup/down is history and FAILED - thus - the next step is what can we learn from the fail - what are the good, bad and ugly parts? what was missing and so on. Now how do you "fix" textile (or markdown)?
    - danmur 5y ago
      Conversely, if you're already familiar with something, it might make sense to you despite being poorly written and unconvincing.
      - geraldbauer 5y ago
        What argument(s) are unconvincing to you? For more context let me add / point out the side-by-side samples (texti vs markdown vs latex vs wikipedia markup), see https://github.com/texti/texti.github.io/tree/master/samples https://github.com/texti/texti.github.io/tree/master/samples using the Wikipedia article on markup as an real-world sample.
    - nvrspyx 5y ago
      - geraldbauer 5y ago
        Can I return the favor and compliment your comment and writing style?
cryptos 5y ago
At least the tables (https://textile-lang.com/doc/tables https://textile-lang.com/doc/tables) are a bit too simplistic. Such tables are very confusing with longer contents and it is not possible to use it with nested markub like code blocks or bullet lists. That is much better with AsciiDoc (https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/#a-new-perspective-on-tables https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/#a-new-p...).
- schipplock 5y ago
  I had some complex tables in textile. They become unusable after some time :(. I try not to use tables in textile.
encryptluks2 5y ago
Finally, been hoping to see new innovations in the markup space. I like some of the syntax. h6. or //h6 Is a lot more readable IMO than ######
- masklinn 5y ago
  I’ve got bad news for you. Textile is close to 20 years old, it’s one of the “cambrian explosion” of lightweight markup languages from the early-to-mid aughts which got choked out by Markdown’s rise to prominence.
dejj 5y ago
Also see: Aftertext, which separates markup from text https://breckyunits.com/aftertext.html https://breckyunits.com/aftertext.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29643313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29643313
- account-5 5y ago
  I remember this having read it before but for me personally this makes things harder to read and is way more complicated.
usrbinbash 5y ago
The name got me thinking...what would we call the language used to program a Jacquard Loom?
hsn915 5y ago
Does anyone actually care about the header levels (h1, h2, h3 ..) when writing text? As far as I can tell, what you actually want is to denote a section and give it a header, and within the section you may want to denote sub sections. Something like this: @section { @title: This is my section title Text, paragraph, etc. @section { @title: Subsection Title Text, text, text. } } But I'm not aware of any markup language that lets you do this.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  HTML5 has <section> blocks for this kind of document structure: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/section https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/se...
  - hsn915 5y ago
    I meant more broadly, the header level number should be derived from its nesting level without you specifying it explicitly. This gives you more freedom to re-arrange (refactor?) the text without having to mass-edit header levels.
    - psytrx 5y ago
      This is what annoys me the most when developing web components. You never know which context your component might be used in, and your <hX> element might be just plain wrong. I prefer not using them and fall back to using <header> elements inside sections, but styling them globally makes it rather difficult and ugly to work with. What's other people's solution to this? Or am I just picky when it comes to semantics?
      - qbasic_forever 5y ago
        If it's super broken or critical, maybe a slot to let the user provide their desired header level would be an option? Or maybe even a simple prop would be enough. If your component is itself header-like, perhaps making 6 versions, fun-header-1, fun-header-2, etc. that are explicitly scoped to that level header would make sense too.
schipplock 5y ago
Redmine is using this :).
- stevekemp 5y ago
  That's the only time I ever came across it, and it was always frustrating to switch between markdown and textile depending on which application/site I was using. I don't love markdown, but I am pleased that it "won" in the sense that I can use it everywhere. There's nothing worse than having to use three+ different markup languages during the course of a day.
  - schipplock 5y ago
    At work I am "responsible" for a redmine install, and users are constantly asking for a way to use Markdown instead of Textile :).
- cryptos 5y ago
  Bad memories come back ... Redmine is a usability nightmare with probably the worst search functionality in issue trackers.
makecheck 5y ago
I adopted this years ago for writing app “help” content, for roughly the same reasons Markdown was invented (e.g. it was annoying to have to mark up almost every word in text that was largely plain content, and the ability to drop in HTML as needed was super convenient). Although .md files “won”, I still use .textile today.
ImportOllie 5y ago
I don't quite follow what problem this solves. The way I see it, Markdown is great for outputting simple text and readily used for that reason in the Wordpress blog space. Once you start needing more complex styling and formatting then i'd go for either Latex or HTML, both feature rich markup languages. I use markdown for my everyday notes right now, and love it. The syntax is simple, fast to type either on mobile or desktop and pretty easy to read. Looking over the tag based syntax of Textile i'm not sure i'd have as easy a time using it for fast output... and if i'm wanting more style and moving to tags, I might as well use HTML... so what's the use case?
- matt_kantor 5y ago
  Textile existed before Markdown.
- john-doe 5y ago
  > I don't quite follow what problem this solves. Textile was invented around the same time as Markdown, so it tackled the same problem that Markdown tried to solve, only Markdown got more popular. > so what's the use case? Cover most HTML elements and edge cases, something Markdown was never supposed to do.
mwexler 5y ago
Textile was the driving markup behind Textpattern (https://textpattern.com/ https://textpattern.com/), one of the better publishing/CMS tools out there on PHP. It had a nice object oriented approach that was less painful than Wordpress, and gave great flexibility to design aspects in ways that were easier to work with than Wordpress... but Wordpress won the popular marketshare, and TP was relegated to some diehards. Those diehards still pump out fixes and features, and it's worth a look at https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/ https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/ if you want to see something a bit different.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Oh no, I think I may qualify as a diehard now. Or at least a long time diehard user of a diehard CMS. xD Funny to see that word. I still use TXP at [1] and others. Back in the day when I didn't know how to code, and yet too much reliance on Joomla and WordPress plugins was often disastrous (one of those small plugin vendors sold customer data to a very specific type of telemarketing firm, as a funny example), TXP tags absolutely saved the day. You could use them to write web apps with CRUD interfaces, with the help of the admin theme being utterly simple to style away using CSS. You could create a new section within seconds, an instant /whatever endpoint with a blank textarea where you could place any content type or any code you wanted. For example the smd_xml plugin (thanks Stef) where you could write e.g. <tag query="SQL query here" wraptag="p">{title}</tag> to show a quick list of favorite book titles from the DB or whatever content you wanted really. Combine that with another tag for getting GET and POST variables and voila, a lot was possible without leaving the admin interface. Toward the end of my business-oriented TXP days, I was running a network of food and drink distribution & marketing websites which spoke to each other on the back end, hosted a sales material database (labels, product shots, PDFs) along with custom PDF creation tools for salespeople which drew on that database. All without learning to do web coding...and when I was ready to code I was _really_ ready because I had already made some minor fixes to plugins, which were editable via the admin panel directly. (Did I mention that you install plugins by copying and pasting a plain text bundle into the admin? This clipboard install method is pretty amusing and easy on the brain) To this day I enjoy using TXP. It's very lightweight, it has a learning curve, but it works great for blogging and lots of other things. Textile and Markdown both live comfortably in the same mind and it's nice to be able to work with both. 1. https://www.friendlyskies.net/ https://www.friendlyskies.net/
throwaway2016a 5y ago
Bit of a non sequitur but my first job was at an industrial embroidery company (did T-Shirts, hats, etc for big companies... sewed logos on thousands of shirts a day). I was kind of hoping based on the name it would be for that. That industry is woefully lacking good open source and DIY tools for telling the machines what to sew. But back on topic: I'm not sure what in this language would encourage me to move off of markdown at this point. It seems nice but the friction to use yet another markdown language (even if this one is older by 2 years it seems) is high.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
The only thing I dislike about Textile is that it treats line breaks in the source code as <br> when it renders, which makes it annoying to edit in vim. Markdown is nicer in that one aspect. Otherwise, Textile is better (so of course it lost the popularity contest).
trabant00 5y ago
Every time I look at markdown flavors I come up with this question: Why not latex? Granted, I rarely need markdown or latex so this might be just my ignorance. I've tried doing my CV and some presentations in markdown cause I just didn't want to put the time to learn latex. I went markdown -> html -> pdf. I just couldn't get something satisfactory. The pains: pagination, centering, columns, image positioning, colors. And then I took a day to learn enough latex - https://latex-beamer.com/quick-start/ https://latex-beamer.com/quick-start/ - to create a presentation for work. It was a lot easier than I thought and it came out looking great. Here is the skeleton of it so you can judge how complex it is: \documentclass{beamer} \usepackage{hyperref} \usetheme {teheme-name} \title{My Title} \subtitle{My subtitle} \author{me@example.com} \date{\today} \setlength{\parindent}{4ex} \setlength{\parskip}{1ex} \begin{document} \begin{section}{Title} \begin{frame} \titlepage \end{frame} \begin{frame}{Contents} \tableofcontents \end{frame} \end{section} \begin{section}{Some section} \begin{frame}{Page title} My text here \begin{itemize} \item one item \item another item \end{itemize} \end{frame} \end{section} \end{document}
- eggy 5y ago
  I had a textdrive account and used textile for my sites back in 2002 or 2003. I don't think markdown was around then. Textile was easy to work with at the time. I took the trouble to learn LaTeX in 2008 or 2009. I like it a lot, and I switched my resume/CV over to it. It's work, but you can get such nice results.
- pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
  I also like having a Turing-complete macro system in a text formatting language that can only support a fixed-in-advance page layout.
- wizhi 5y ago
  Markdown simply isn't meant for that kind of content. The idea of markdown, is that you end up with a text that is readable by itself, and renderable in more simple graphical environments. No one should ever ask themselves "how do I do image positioning" or "how do I add pagination" when dealing with markdown. That's just not what it's good for. Imagine having to write comments on HN using LaTeX.

67 points by john-doe 5y ago

TIL that Atlassian's Confluence (used at big corps for internal documentation) uses Textile, or something similar, for their text editor. https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-wiki-markup-251003035.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-wiki-markup-...

geraldbauer 5y ago

May I introduce Texti (Markup Language) - Text with Instructions (.texti) - Structured Documents in Text with Formatting Conventions - that tries to offer the best of all worlds - that is - markdown / textile / mediawiki markup/down / latex and more. See https://texti.github.io https://texti.github.io PS: An "important" building block missing in markdown / textile is built-in templates a la mediawiki markup/down. Lets you add "macros" for images or figures and so on (and much more). Extension and evolution is key - as always - and wins out in the long run.

wavesplash 5y ago
a) awesome. b) please increase the default font size of that doc. c) please consider moving the exposition to the end and just jump into the good stuff about how it works and what's different. Perhaps a short intro like "Texti is modern markup. Think Markdown and Wikimedia markup had a baby. Here's how to do all the things..."
- geraldbauer 5y ago
  Thanks. Note this text is not a commercial or ad. My philosophy is function over form wins. Period. Comments and critique always welcome. If I may return the favor - do NOT use the word modern - as in say 5 or 10 years - that may read different. Do NOT upcase markdown - it is today a generic term / word. The had a baby "idea" is stupid. The idea is about evolution and adding AND yes, deleting and forever changing and so on. Anyways, here's the source (w/ public domain - no rights reserved dedication) - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/texti/texti.github.io/master/README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/texti/texti.github.io/mast... you are more than welcome to publish your own teaser / promo / analysis / opinion.
sprucevoid 5y ago
To me that page is very confusing. Feels like I'm reading a single person's private brainstorm notes rather than a documentation.
- geraldbauer 5y ago
  FYI: New ideas first presented are always very confusing. Let it sink in. Note: The page is public - thus, if I may return the favor - change the confusing private to public in your sentence (or is that "knee jerk private commentary?"). PS: Let me add more context - The top-linked Textile Markup Language is a documentation website. Textile markup/down is history and FAILED - thus - the next step is what can we learn from the fail - what are the good, bad and ugly parts? what was missing and so on. Now how do you "fix" textile (or markdown)?
  - danmur 5y ago
    Conversely, if you're already familiar with something, it might make sense to you despite being poorly written and unconvincing.
    - geraldbauer 5y ago
      What argument(s) are unconvincing to you? For more context let me add / point out the side-by-side samples (texti vs markdown vs latex vs wikipedia markup), see https://github.com/texti/texti.github.io/tree/master/samples https://github.com/texti/texti.github.io/tree/master/samples using the Wikipedia article on markup as an real-world sample.
  - nvrspyx 5y ago
    - geraldbauer 5y ago
      Can I return the favor and compliment your comment and writing style?

cryptos 5y ago

At least the tables (https://textile-lang.com/doc/tables https://textile-lang.com/doc/tables) are a bit too simplistic. Such tables are very confusing with longer contents and it is not possible to use it with nested markub like code blocks or bullet lists. That is much better with AsciiDoc (https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/#a-new-perspective-on-tables https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/#a-new-p...).

schipplock 5y ago
I had some complex tables in textile. They become unusable after some time :(. I try not to use tables in textile.

encryptluks2 5y ago

Finally, been hoping to see new innovations in the markup space. I like some of the syntax. h6. or //h6 Is a lot more readable IMO than ######

masklinn 5y ago
I’ve got bad news for you. Textile is close to 20 years old, it’s one of the “cambrian explosion” of lightweight markup languages from the early-to-mid aughts which got choked out by Markdown’s rise to prominence.

dejj 5y ago

Also see: Aftertext, which separates markup from text https://breckyunits.com/aftertext.html https://breckyunits.com/aftertext.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29643313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29643313

account-5 5y ago
I remember this having read it before but for me personally this makes things harder to read and is way more complicated.

usrbinbash 5y ago

The name got me thinking...what would we call the language used to program a Jacquard Loom?

hsn915 5y ago

Does anyone actually care about the header levels (h1, h2, h3 ..) when writing text? As far as I can tell, what you actually want is to denote a section and give it a header, and within the section you may want to denote sub sections. Something like this: @section { @title: This is my section title Text, paragraph, etc. @section { @title: Subsection Title Text, text, text. } } But I'm not aware of any markup language that lets you do this.

qbasic_forever 5y ago
HTML5 has <section> blocks for this kind of document structure: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/section https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/se...
- hsn915 5y ago
  I meant more broadly, the header level number should be derived from its nesting level without you specifying it explicitly. This gives you more freedom to re-arrange (refactor?) the text without having to mass-edit header levels.
  - psytrx 5y ago
    This is what annoys me the most when developing web components. You never know which context your component might be used in, and your <hX> element might be just plain wrong. I prefer not using them and fall back to using <header> elements inside sections, but styling them globally makes it rather difficult and ugly to work with. What's other people's solution to this? Or am I just picky when it comes to semantics?
    - qbasic_forever 5y ago
      If it's super broken or critical, maybe a slot to let the user provide their desired header level would be an option? Or maybe even a simple prop would be enough. If your component is itself header-like, perhaps making 6 versions, fun-header-1, fun-header-2, etc. that are explicitly scoped to that level header would make sense too.

schipplock 5y ago

Redmine is using this :).

stevekemp 5y ago
That's the only time I ever came across it, and it was always frustrating to switch between markdown and textile depending on which application/site I was using. I don't love markdown, but I am pleased that it "won" in the sense that I can use it everywhere. There's nothing worse than having to use three+ different markup languages during the course of a day.
- schipplock 5y ago
  At work I am "responsible" for a redmine install, and users are constantly asking for a way to use Markdown instead of Textile :).
cryptos 5y ago
Bad memories come back ... Redmine is a usability nightmare with probably the worst search functionality in issue trackers.

makecheck 5y ago

I adopted this years ago for writing app “help” content, for roughly the same reasons Markdown was invented (e.g. it was annoying to have to mark up almost every word in text that was largely plain content, and the ability to drop in HTML as needed was super convenient). Although .md files “won”, I still use .textile today.

ImportOllie 5y ago

I don't quite follow what problem this solves. The way I see it, Markdown is great for outputting simple text and readily used for that reason in the Wordpress blog space. Once you start needing more complex styling and formatting then i'd go for either Latex or HTML, both feature rich markup languages. I use markdown for my everyday notes right now, and love it. The syntax is simple, fast to type either on mobile or desktop and pretty easy to read. Looking over the tag based syntax of Textile i'm not sure i'd have as easy a time using it for fast output... and if i'm wanting more style and moving to tags, I might as well use HTML... so what's the use case?

matt_kantor 5y ago
Textile existed before Markdown.
john-doe 5y ago
> I don't quite follow what problem this solves. Textile was invented around the same time as Markdown, so it tackled the same problem that Markdown tried to solve, only Markdown got more popular. > so what's the use case? Cover most HTML elements and edge cases, something Markdown was never supposed to do.

mwexler 5y ago

Textile was the driving markup behind Textpattern (https://textpattern.com/ https://textpattern.com/), one of the better publishing/CMS tools out there on PHP. It had a nice object oriented approach that was less painful than Wordpress, and gave great flexibility to design aspects in ways that were easier to work with than Wordpress... but Wordpress won the popular marketshare, and TP was relegated to some diehards. Those diehards still pump out fixes and features, and it's worth a look at https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/ https://github.com/textpattern/textpattern/ if you want to see something a bit different.

themodelplumber 5y ago
Oh no, I think I may qualify as a diehard now. Or at least a long time diehard user of a diehard CMS. xD Funny to see that word. I still use TXP at [1] and others. Back in the day when I didn't know how to code, and yet too much reliance on Joomla and WordPress plugins was often disastrous (one of those small plugin vendors sold customer data to a very specific type of telemarketing firm, as a funny example), TXP tags absolutely saved the day. You could use them to write web apps with CRUD interfaces, with the help of the admin theme being utterly simple to style away using CSS. You could create a new section within seconds, an instant /whatever endpoint with a blank textarea where you could place any content type or any code you wanted. For example the smd_xml plugin (thanks Stef) where you could write e.g. <tag query="SQL query here" wraptag="p">{title}</tag> to show a quick list of favorite book titles from the DB or whatever content you wanted really. Combine that with another tag for getting GET and POST variables and voila, a lot was possible without leaving the admin interface. Toward the end of my business-oriented TXP days, I was running a network of food and drink distribution & marketing websites which spoke to each other on the back end, hosted a sales material database (labels, product shots, PDFs) along with custom PDF creation tools for salespeople which drew on that database. All without learning to do web coding...and when I was ready to code I was _really_ ready because I had already made some minor fixes to plugins, which were editable via the admin panel directly. (Did I mention that you install plugins by copying and pasting a plain text bundle into the admin? This clipboard install method is pretty amusing and easy on the brain) To this day I enjoy using TXP. It's very lightweight, it has a learning curve, but it works great for blogging and lots of other things. Textile and Markdown both live comfortably in the same mind and it's nice to be able to work with both. 1. https://www.friendlyskies.net/ https://www.friendlyskies.net/

throwaway2016a 5y ago

Bit of a non sequitur but my first job was at an industrial embroidery company (did T-Shirts, hats, etc for big companies... sewed logos on thousands of shirts a day). I was kind of hoping based on the name it would be for that. That industry is woefully lacking good open source and DIY tools for telling the machines what to sew. But back on topic: I'm not sure what in this language would encourage me to move off of markdown at this point. It seems nice but the friction to use yet another markdown language (even if this one is older by 2 years it seems) is high.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

The only thing I dislike about Textile is that it treats line breaks in the source code as <br> when it renders, which makes it annoying to edit in vim. Markdown is nicer in that one aspect. Otherwise, Textile is better (so of course it lost the popularity contest).

trabant00 5y ago

Every time I look at markdown flavors I come up with this question: Why not latex? Granted, I rarely need markdown or latex so this might be just my ignorance. I've tried doing my CV and some presentations in markdown cause I just didn't want to put the time to learn latex. I went markdown -> html -> pdf. I just couldn't get something satisfactory. The pains: pagination, centering, columns, image positioning, colors. And then I took a day to learn enough latex - https://latex-beamer.com/quick-start/ https://latex-beamer.com/quick-start/ - to create a presentation for work. It was a lot easier than I thought and it came out looking great. Here is the skeleton of it so you can judge how complex it is: \documentclass{beamer} \usepackage{hyperref} \usetheme {teheme-name} \title{My Title} \subtitle{My subtitle} \author{me@example.com} \date{\today} \setlength{\parindent}{4ex} \setlength{\parskip}{1ex} \begin{document} \begin{section}{Title} \begin{frame} \titlepage \end{frame} \begin{frame}{Contents} \tableofcontents \end{frame} \end{section} \begin{section}{Some section} \begin{frame}{Page title} My text here \begin{itemize} \item one item \item another item \end{itemize} \end{frame} \end{section} \end{document}

eggy 5y ago
I had a textdrive account and used textile for my sites back in 2002 or 2003. I don't think markdown was around then. Textile was easy to work with at the time. I took the trouble to learn LaTeX in 2008 or 2009. I like it a lot, and I switched my resume/CV over to it. It's work, but you can get such nice results.
pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
I also like having a Turing-complete macro system in a text formatting language that can only support a fixed-in-advance page layout.
wizhi 5y ago
Markdown simply isn't meant for that kind of content. The idea of markdown, is that you end up with a text that is readable by itself, and renderable in more simple graphical environments. No one should ever ask themselves "how do I do image positioning" or "how do I add pagination" when dealing with markdown. That's just not what it's good for. Imagine having to write comments on HN using LaTeX.