I think Textile is a good idea. By that I mean I think creating easy to use text formatting rules is a good idea.
So this weekend I worked on implementing some of the ideas into a tool I’m working on. So far I’ve got the basics of paragraphs, blockquotes, headings, bold (strong) and italic (emphasis) working. I probably would have gotten more done if I hadn’t been double processing the text for 20 minutes. Argh…
At a minimum, I still need to get numeric and bulleted lists working. The other stuff is nice but not critical. Yet.
Of course mine is ugly-hacked perl code, not any sort of elegant well-designed, well-thought out masterpiece. That’s ok for now. That might even be ok for the future. We’ll see won’t we? Hmmm?