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We should have Markdown-rendered websites

ipfs.io

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Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#31

Post by timdaub »

hospadar wrote: post #26

I mean it _sounds_ good, but how will we cram a million ads down user's throats and measure every twitch of their input devices? It's almost as though the author is suggesting that web site proprietors might be more interested in "serving content" than "driving engagement" which I find disturbing and upsetting. /s

haha that's definitely a big component of it all.

But the engaged clickable web is anyways dead. This post is a static HTML file hosted on IPFS with no back links to my carefully curated blog and media presence. No branding. It's because I've accepted that people's bullshit-radar is sensitive towards overly optimized engagement content. Rather I want my text to be read and those that care will anyways online-search me. It's not my idea btw. The web has reached peak clickability: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/has-the-internet-reached-pea...

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#32

Post by buro9 »

graypegg wrote: post #20

HTML is already a markup language. You could just as easily make basic websites using HTML and some basic inline CSS. (They’d even have some extra features missing from Markdown that I’d consider still part of a basic content formatting suite like floating or multi-column layouts. They’d even have a defined standard for machine readable metadata!) The problem is that people don’t make websites like that very often, e…

HTML is a subset of Markdown.

You can include in Markdown any and all HTML.

What Markdown provides here is an even lower barrier to entry for the majority of people... they just write text, learn a fraction more Markdown to so more... and if they want total control they eventually learn HTML too.

It's not mutually exclusive... Markdown includes HTML.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#36

Post by pie_flavor »

> We really need a new publishing tool for everyone that doesn't require intricate knowledge of how the entire web computing stack functions.

That tool is called HTML. It is usually supplemented by CSS. Every Markdown element has a one-to-one translation to it. This webpage is a particular stylesheet, plus basic HTML elements that you could write in style just as easily as you could write them in *_# style. If HTML requires particular defaults to look right, then that is a really great reason to fix the defaults, but not a really great reason to junk the whole thing and start over.

Markdown isn't particularly good, it isn't particularly standardized, and it isn't even compatible with reader mode (e.g. images). Just write HTML. Browser standards have not degraded to the point that you need to write a web page differently than people wrote them fifteen years ago for it to look the same; a toolbox with a million complicated tools and one obvious screwdriver is not a toolbox that makes it very hard to unscrew screws.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#37

Post by jerf »

falcolas wrote: post #5

OK. Which flavor of markdown should we get every browser manufacturer to use?

CommonMark seems like the obvious choice: https://commonmark.org/

It isn't as supported as I'd like, but it does exist and I've encountered it "in the wild" a few times, so it's not just some guy typing away on a website either.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#39

Post by xigoi »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #18
therobot24 wrote: post #6

isn't this why HTML was invented? agree that it'd be nice to have a markdown file be rendered inherently within the browser so i don't have to use haroopad on my windows machine, but it feels like we're just going to reinvent HTML

Agreed, original HTML was not too different than markdown really. (But more standard, and slightly more powerful with things like tables, code blocks, and definition lists, all of which are only non-standard extensions to markdown!) Maybe what OP really wants is a lot more people to write HTML without _any_ CSS or Javascript. But that's already more or less available, so there are reasons people don't do it to grappl…

> Perhaps a mode where you tell the browser to ignore any CSS or Javascript; possibly also in this mode the browser could use better more readable standard html rendering, similar to what most markdown renderers choose by default (bigger font sizes and line-height, more and more even whitspace around headings, maximum page width, etc), instead of the legacy choices they are now sticking with for backwards compat.

Isn't that just Reader Mode?

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