Textile is a lightweight markup language that uses a text formatting syntax to convert plain text into structured HTML markup. Textile is used for writing articles, forum posts, readme documentation, and any other type of written content published online.

History

Textile was developed by Dean Allen in 2002, which he billed as "a humane web text generator" that enabled you to "simply write". Dean created Textile for use in Textpattern, the CMS he also developed about the same time. Textile is one of several lightweight markup languages to have influenced the development of

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown i ...

Doctype support

Text marked-up with Textile converts into valid

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

when rendered in a web browser, and though it probably varies from one implementation type to another, an installation of Textile can be set for a Doctype Declaration of XHTML or

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

, with XHTML being the default for backward compatibility. In the PHP implementation, for example, when using Textile's all-caps abbreviation syntax – AGE(A Given Example) – the result will render as an abbr element in HTML5 and as an acronym element in XHTML. Likewise, as of PHP version 3.5, if you use alignment markers in Textile's image syntax, HTML5 will get extra classes on the rendered img element, while XHTML remains with the align attribute.

Syntax usage

Various resources are available for learning and using Textile: * TxStyle – a help site for the PHP implementation of Textile, and provides a converter. This site is currently used by the Textpattern CMS project. * Textile Reference Site for RedCloth – a help site for the Ruby implementation of Textile. * Textile Syntax: Eclipse – a reference site for the Java implementation of Textile that's now merged with Mylin WikiText. * Textile 2 Syntax – MovableType's Textile authoring documentation. * Textile Cheatsheet – a basic quick-reference sheet from Warped Visions. In addition to its suite of syntax usage, Textile automatically inserts character entity references for apostrophes, opening and closing single and double quotation marks, ellipses and em dashes, to name a few.

Licensing

Textile is distributed under a

BSD-style license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...

and is included with, or available as a plugin for, several content-management systems.

Software and services

Various projects use (or have used) Textile: * Basecamp Classic – the original Basecamp project management software from 37signals used Textile * Assembla *

Atlassian Atlassian Corporation () is an Australian software company that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. The company is domiciled in Delaware, with global headquarters in Sydney, Austra ...

( JIRA) *

Guild Wars 2 ''Guild Wars 2'' is a free-to-play, massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by ArenaNet and published by NCSoft. Set in the fantasy world of Tyria, the core game follows the re-emergence of Destiny's Edge, a disbanded guild ded ...

official forums * Jekyll (software) *

Know Your Meme ''Know Your Meme'' (''KYM'') is a website and video series which uses wiki software to document various Internet memes and other online phenomena, such as viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, Internet celebrities and more. It also inves ...

* OpenProject * Qt official forums *

Redmine Redmine is a free and open source, web-based project management and issue tracking tool. It allows users to manage multiple projects and associated subprojects. It features per project wikis and forums, time tracking, and flexible, role-based acc ...

Salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

– uses Textile in its Desk.com product *

SUSE Studio SUSE Studio was an online Linux software creation tool by SUSE. Users could develop their own Linux distro, software appliance, or virtual appliance, mainly choosing which applications and packages they want on their " custom" Linux and how it l ...

* Textile Note – a text application for

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

, Android, and Windows that supports Textile * Textile Wiki * WriteMonkey – a distraction-free desktop text editor for Windows; supports various markup languages, including Textile * WiGit – a

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

-based Wiki

References

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External links

Official website
Lightweight markup languages