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In any conversation about Markdown, I think it's appropriate to mention Textile [1] as well. Textile is fairly similar, intended to fulfill the same niche of markup with slightly different syntax. Personally, I prefer textile because I think it's a bit more expressive, though I'd rather be writing LaTeX...

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_%28markup_language%29

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Textile is a different beast. Unprocessed Markdown is meant to be human consumable, not just human readable. Specifically, you should be able to send a raw Markdown file to someone who doesn't know what Markdown is, and it should still be pleasant to read for that person.

Textile uses easy to read syntax, but line prefixes like 'h1.' leak the HTML intentions to the reader. That's not to say textile doesn't have it's uses though. Textile solves problems that Markdown doesn't even address, even in its extended forms. For example, Textile allows you to apply span tags (with class name) using Textile syntax. Markdown requires you to write actual HTML.

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