Which Markup?

I did some planning today on the next iteration of Notanda and have gotten some direction for it, making it more wiki-like in some ways, more blog-like in others, but more than anything reducing friction.

Basically I want the mechanics of the system to get the hell out of the way — little or no pre-formatting on my part. No HTML tags if we can avoid it. Easy markup seems like the answer to that, so I did a quick survey of available markup systems.

Currently, to indicate (for example) emphasis and strong emphasis in one of the plaintext files that I use to automagically generate these entries, I use raw HTML tags: <em>emphasis</em> and <strong>strong</strong>. I don’t want to have to do that anymore. Here are some of the other systems’ methods:

Textile: _emphasis_ *strong*

Markdown: *emphasis* **strong**

Original wikiwiki and MediaWiki: ”emphasis” ”’strong”’

LaTeX (not LaTeX2e): {\it italics} {\bf boldface}

LaTeX2e: \emph{emphasized text}

Gotta say, Textile feels pretty natural to me. Hmm.

The other two especial needs are link anchors and images. Again, Textile’s implementation seems pretty good: !imageurl! and "linktext":url are spiffy. (Perhaps I can code it so during processing it goes out on the net to grab certain info — img dimensions, <title>titles</title>, etc.) Maybe %code% and * # lists too.

The basics of what Textile does.

Don’t really need the other stuff — yet.

Though I’m leaning toward Textile at the moment, I haven’t made a final decision yet.

Here are posts on the subject of Textile and Markdown:

• Home sweet Home: A few comments on BMachine
• jclark.org: Markdown
• Markdown-discuss: asterisks as bold or italic?
• Frank Hecker: Using the Markdown plugin