What is Textile?
Textile is a lightweight markup language that converts plain text formatting to clean HTML, allowing users to create formatted documents without knowledge of HTML syntax.
Some key features of Textile include:
- Simple and intuitive formatting using punctuation characters
- Supports text styling like bold, italics, lists, quotes, code blocks etc.
- Can add images, links, tables and other HTML elements easily
- Output tidy valid XHTML markup
- Supported in many content management systems and blogging platforms
Textile syntax is designed to resemble natural language as closely as possible. For example, enclosing words in asterisks like *this* will convert them to bold, while enclosing in underscores like _this_ will convert to italics. Links, images, lists use similarly simple syntax.
As a lightweight markup language, Textile enables producing rich text content for the web quickly and easily without learning HTML syntax. Due to its simple yet flexible formatting options, it is popular for blogging, documentation, content/knowledge management systems.