The last time I tried Textile, the "pre." prefix didn't produce the desired effect. But maybe that was a problem with that particular website's CSS. Thanks for correcting me there.

> Markdown can feel limited in its access to readable HTML style indicators.

Fair point. Textile seems to be optimized for producing styled HTML, whereas Markdown tries very hard to make the user forget about the fact that they're using a markup language at all. Even its name suggests that it's meant to be an anti-markup-language markup language.

For example, if you use "pre." in Textile, you're saying that the text should appear exactly as entered (because HTML ignores whitespace by default). Similarly, class attributes are only meaningful in HTML+CSS. On the other hand, when you indent a code block in Markdown, you're not saying anything about presentation, you're just making the code block look nice in plain text while also making a semantic point that the indented block is computer code. Gruber has consistently vetoed any feature that would make Markdown look less like plain text and more like HTML. You would think it odd if a plain text document contained things like "pre." and "(class)".

This makes it easy to compile Markdown to non-HTML formats like LaTeX and even ODF, which MultiMarkdown does. But I can see how Markdown's obsession with plain-text purity can be a limitation if you're trying to add style to a document that you know will be compiled to HTML.