Dean Allen invents Textile, a light-weight in-line text mark-up language for web display. Noel Jackson gets excited and makes up propaganda/reference cards. Brad Choate makes a Textile text formatting plug-in for Movable Type. Mark Pilgrim ports it to Python. One of Mark's readers asks what the major differences are between Textile and reStructured Text, a light-weight mark-up language born of Python, Zope and Structured Text. Mark answers.

I'm glad someone asked. I have to switch between several different kinds of light-weight mark-up in a single day, and I'd hate to have to learn another one without a good reason-- especially since the only reason there are such significant differences in the others are due to lack of historical knowledge by their developers. No doubt different designs will work for different purposes (blogging is likely different from commenting source code), I just don't want to see this particular wheel re-invented again without historical guidance.

Quick start guide to reStructuredText. Docutils project page.