Please identify the most popular lightweight markup languages and compare their strengths and weaknesses. These languages should be general-purpose markup for technical prose, such as for documentation (for example, Haml doesn't count).
See also: Markdown versus ReStructuredText
I know of three main languages used commonly in the greater programming and tech community: Textile, Markdown, and reStructuredText. All three can be learned in a couple of hours or "winged" with the cheat sheet nearby.
Textile
- Used by Redmine and the Ruby community
- 113 questions currently tagged on Stack Overflow
- The most similar to HTML, but least readable source
- Easiest nested lists of all three languages
- Not understandable to non-programmers or the HTML-ignorant
- Ideal for complex short documents (with links, nested lists, code, custom HTML); for example: short documentation, how-tos, blog or CMS content
- Syntax reference
Markdown
- Doesn't seem to have a home language "community" but...
- 1274 questions tagged on Stack Overflow*
- Emphasizes source code readability, similar to email traditions
- Straightforward HTML embedding (you just type the tags out)
- No way to make tables besides embedding HTML
- You know it already if you know Stack Overflow
- Easy to learn if you already know reStructuredText
- Automatic email address obfuscation for the format <[email protected]> (with angle brackets)
- Syntax reference
reStructuredText (A.K.A. ReST)
- Popular in the Python community
- 285 questions tagged on Stack Overflow
- A bit persnickety about whitespace and alignment if you ask me
- Lists (especially nested lists) and paragraphs always seem to get in fights
- Readable by non-programmers
- Only format which can build a table of contents (via an extension in the Python reference implementation)
- Directly converts to other formats like PDF and XML
- Ideal for large documents with lots of prose (e.g. an alternative to docbook for a user manual)
- Syntax reference