Re:Ask YC: Textile vs Markdown
by tdavis on Monday May 12, 2008 @12:02AM
(#187267)
Since they are so similar, I think it helps to answer a few simple questions:
1. Do you need something that one has that the other doesn't?
2. Who's your target audience? Are they going to be writing a lot of markup? If so, considering the syntax differences is more important than say for blog comments where the only likely uses are bold, italic, and link.
3. How is the library support in your chosen language; are there any quirks? I remember at one point a bug surfaced in py-textile that had something to do with unicode chars so if you were using a lot of unicode chars it was better to go with Markdown.
If I had to pick one I generally like more it would probably be textile, but it's so dependent on the situation that I have no generalized evidence to support one being superior as a rule. If you only want to deal with one, period, I would probably go with Markdown just because, as mentioned, it is more widely used and therefor (slightly) more well-known (also highly dependent on audience) and likely to be better supported lib-wise.
1. Do you need something that one has that the other doesn't?
2. Who's your target audience? Are they going to be writing a lot of markup? If so, considering the syntax differences is more important than say for blog comments where the only likely uses are bold, italic, and link.
3. How is the library support in your chosen language; are there any quirks? I remember at one point a bug surfaced in py-textile that had something to do with unicode chars so if you were using a lot of unicode chars it was better to go with Markdown.
If I had to pick one I generally like more it would probably be textile, but it's so dependent on the situation that I have no generalized evidence to support one being superior as a rule. If you only want to deal with one, period, I would probably go with Markdown just because, as mentioned, it is more widely used and therefor (slightly) more well-known (also highly dependent on audience) and likely to be better supported lib-wise.