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.

Doctype support

Text marked-up with Textile converts into valid HTML 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, with XHTML being the default for backward compatibility. In the PHP implementation, for example, when using Textile's all-caps abbreviation syntax – – the result will render as an element in HTML5 and as an 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 element, while XHTML remains with the attribute.

Syntax usage

Various resources are available for learning and using Textile: 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 and is included with, or available as a plugin for, several content-management systems.

Software and services

Various projects use (or have used) Textile: