background & related work

Xilize and Textile share a similar syntax but were created with different purposes in mind. Textile is primarily a server-side filter for wiki's and weblogs while Xilize was created to be a client-side web site author's assistant. The name Xilize was chosen to distinquish this difference in purpose.

Textile

  • Textile is a formatting syntax created by Dean Allen.
  • MT-Textile 2 was written in Perl by Brad Choate for Movable Type with extensions to Allen's Textile syntax.
  • TextilePHP is a PHP port by Jim Riggs of Textile 2. Riggs and Choate have attempted to keep their work in sync.
  • JTextile 1.1 written by Gareth Simpson with updates by Phil Wilson is a Java implementation of Allen's Textile.

Xilize

  • is a independent implementation of a variant (a superset) of the Textile syntax.
  • runs from
    • the command line and
    • as a plugin for the jEdit text editor.
  • has an API for execution from a Java program.
  • can automatically find and use external CSS stylesheets, headers, footers, and include files.
  • provides constructs like define, ifdef and include to simplify construction of similar web pages and provide a common look and feel to a web site.
  • was designed for speed with pre-compiled regular expressions.
  • in version 3.0, Xilize supports macros and custom signatures written in BeanShell