This is very nice, but after using Textile (and this service in its earlier incarnations) for some time, I switched to Tiki for use with my weblog (there's a Tiki plugin for Blosxom). Tiki has the advantage that it also translates diacritical characters (accented letters, like in French) and symbols (like the trademark symbol) to their UTF-8 equivalents. Textile as originally designed by Dean of Textism.com fame can do this too (try it yourself), but the Textile service (renamed HumaneText for reasons unknown to me) cannot, and I didn't succeed in writing the bit of extra python code to handle those characters; maybe Python and diacritical characters just don't get along very well.

It seems Tiki doesn't contain code that specifically translates each diacritical character it encounters, but that, instead, somehow, it transforms the text as a whole UTF-8. I can type option-e+e and find the correct HTML equivalent in the tikied source, just like I could using Textile through the Textism web form.

I would really like to see UTF-8 translation added to this service, because Textile it does have major advantages over Tiki; Tiki isn't able to produce line breaks, to name one of its flaws, and it has no support for classes. Textile does have all that.

Three stars, not four or five, because the service does not do as much as the original it was derived from. Not two or one, because it's a good start. But please change the name back to Textile, if the original author of the code makes no objections to that.