We should have Markdown-rendered websites
41–50 of 351 posts
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#42I spend a good part of my week writing docs. The docs that come out of Markdown are hard to read, hard to maintain, long, ugly, and limited, requiring postprocessing for simple things like a Table of Contents. Websites need content to be even richer than docs (and no, Mr. Developer, what you want is not the sole requirement of the rest of the people on the planet). If you want to make an entire website out of Markdow…
You've described a static site generator, which I mean not as "hey you should have known that" but more as a "good news, that basically exists and you can use it now!"
No, there's no standard with static site generator, but there never will be. The combination of the wide variety of needs and use cases and the ease of starting one of these up (I can literally bash together the skeleton of a useful static site generator in 4 hours, and this isn't just "oh I could recreate dropbox in a weekend if I wanted to because I am a swaggering HN programmer", it is something I've literally done rather than sit down and learn someone else's because it was faster to bash something together than read docs) means that there will never be a shortage of these, and none of them will ever managed to capture 99% of the market to become a de facto standard.
I basically have websites that work the way the author describes. There's no particular need or benefit from expecting the web browsers to do this. There are disadvantages to this approach but the web browser directly rendering the markdown doesn't really solve any of them.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#43Don't forget that markup refers to the document's formatting and markdown is a specific markup library that converts text-to-HTML. So technically all browsers do support markdown.
We should re-visit the actual term "mark-up" which refers to decorating copy during the editing phase. I think many people agree that using markdown to "mark-up" copy on websites is easier.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#44What you are describing is a technical solution to a business and social problem. It won’t actually solve what you think it will.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#45OK. Which flavor of markdown should we get every browser manufacturer to use?
Let's just embrace the chaos and develop a new flavor for every browser until there are precisely 31 different flavors of Markdown. We cap it there, Baskin Robbins style, and then watch the world burn.
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Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#46HTML 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.
—I’d say it’s the other way around isn’t it? Wouldn’t Markdown be a subset of HTML, since all markdown can be expressed in HTML but not all HTML can be expressed in Markdown?—
Edit: Markdown can contain HTML that gets meaningfully interpreted as markup as well.
I’d also say HTML is not difficult to write, even for someone new to the concept. I don’t think anyone making their GeoCities homepage was too strained learning HTML, and those were leagues more advanced than what’s possible with only Markdown!
If you want people to be excited about self-publishing online again, it’s probably best to start with the markup language that allows for some fun :)
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#47OK. Which flavor of markdown should we get every browser manufacturer to use?
Why not use org-mode format, which is a much saner markup language?
Being there, why not just implement full org-mode in browsers natively, and use it instead of html?
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#48This doesn't really make sense, for a couple reasons...
There are many flavors of markdown. We'd need a standards body, compatibility suites, etc., and for all the browser vendors to adopt it.
Meanwhile, markdown is designed to transform to HTML, which browsers already render. Adding a markdown-to-html plugin/step to your web server or publishing process is not exactly the most burdensome thing, relative to everything else it takes to develop, publish, and maintain a site. And it resolves the markdown flavors issue.
The thing is, people could choose to publish, simple uncomplicated sites now -- it would be cheap and easy, too. The HTML is barely more complicated than the equivalent markdown, and it would take a few lines of CSS to apply a basic style.
The many sites that choose to be complicated, cluttered, and expensive will continue to be so, for the same reasons they are now. Markdown would just be another way to build simple sites, which they don't want.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#49While I consider it a bit unrealistic to follow this approach in a big style, I like the idea. However, I would suggest to use asciidoc instead, since markdown is a bit to constrained. For examples image captions or tables are not possible in markdown.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asciidoc.
> AsciiDoc is a plain text markup language for writing technical content. It’s packed with semantic elements and equipped with features to modularize and reuse content. Isn't that the opposite of Markdown?
It's basically a dsl to generate markdown.
People who propose replacing markdown with AsciiDoc completely miss the point of Markdown in my opinion.