Easy text formatting with Textile

Posted 2 April 2007

When I’m writing content for the web, I hate dealing with HTML coding. HTML is rather verbose as a markup language, and having to include closing tags is messy and error-prone.

We’re all pretty much stuck with delivering HTML code from our web sites, but that doesn’t mean we have to write in it. There’s any number of markup approaches that are superior to HTML when it comes to content creation, and which can be used as source code from which to create HTML. Two that are widely used are Textile and Markdown.

Textile was originally developed by Dean Allen for the TextPattern content management system and is now widely used in wikis and blogs. Markdown, created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz, is an alternative that is conceptually similar but with a different syntax. The blog engine this blog uses, Mephisto, provides a choice of Textile or Markdown (or HTML) for posts and comments.

In this article, I’ll show the basics of Textile markup and how easy it is to use it in Rails applications.