There was a discussion around the office recently about using Textile on our blog.
I personally dislike Textile (and similar pseudo-markup), for a few reasons:
- There are too many confusing and incompatible implementations - the Wikipedia entry for "Lightweight Markup Language" is a frightening bestiary that ought to make anyone think twice. We already have to endure this pain on Basecamp, Lighthouse, GitHub, Jira... I don't want to make it worse.
- Once you implement a filter you're stuck with it - If you change your mind, you can't easily turn the filter off without breaking your content. By using HTML your content is already in the web's universal language.
- I realize not everyone agrees with me, and I definitely do not want HTML authoring to became an obstacle. Fortunately most text editors support writing in the markup language of your choice. For example, TextMate has this built-in command:
Bundles -> Markdown -> convert to HTML.
- Now that HTML5 has officially made some closing tags optional, composing e.g. lists is much more humane. The list you're reading right now has no closing
</li> tags!
Now get off my lawn!