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Why would anyone make Joe Average use Textile anyway when there are plenty of rich text editors available? Many (most?) have button bars Joe would be familiar with if he's ever used MS Word (which most Joes have). And again, many are cheap, free, and/or Open Source.

A properly configured app that filters user input doesn't need to require users to know any markup languages at all. So why?

Stop thinking like geeks and think like users.

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I've found that many power users prefer the precise control that Textile (or bare HTML/CSS) provide. They really take advantage of the ability to specify floats, margins, and the like.

I've tried supporting both Textile and 3rd party wysiwyg, but it just gets to be a hassle when multiple users try to edit the same thing. They wysiwyg outputs some pretty gross HTML, which the Textile users then have to deal with.

Still, if all you offer is very basic formatting, then a wysiwyg rich text editor is an excellent choice.

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