Markdown vs Textile for writing about web development
This article was originally published on 03/10/2008 by Stephan over at Brighternet. Migrated with permission.
Both Markdown and Textile are similar when it comes to generating most basic formatting, like headers, paragraphs, blockquotes and lists. However, when writing technical articles about web development, Textile wins for two simple reasons.
Adding class (or id or style) to links
When creating links, I want to add a class that allows styling to indicate that the link points to an external site rather than a different page on my site.
Markdown does not allow you to add a class (or id or style) to links. Textile does.
"(class)(#id){style}[language]Name(title)":URLAcronyms
There are lots of acronyms in computing, so support for them when writing technical articles is essential. Markdown doesn’t handle them, Textile does.
HTML(HyperText Markup Language)
So, there it is. I use Textile because it avoids the hassle of hand coding links and acronyms in HTML.
Posted by Stephan on 18 Jun 2010. Tagged markdown, textile.