Just use a Markdown-based CMS like Pico. Free, open-source, and uses Twig templating.
We should have Markdown-rendered websites
51–60 of 351 posts
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#52What you are describing is a technical solution to a business and social problem. It won’t actually solve what you think it will.
Completely agree. It's already pretty easy to create a nice readable page with an off-the-shelf stylesheet & semantic markup.
Sites choose not to do that, for non-technical reasons.
For all it's faults, this is partially what AMP aimed to solve, by restricting what developers could do. However, developers/businesses didn't adopt AMP because it was a better user experience, they adopted it because it got them higher up in Google search.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#53HTML 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.
Markup is not the barrier to entry. Nobody in 2022 is building HTML-only websites. Even 20 years ago CMSes let hundreds of thousands of people write blogs online.
Let's say somebody takes the time to learn Markdown. Then what?
Are they going to then also learn how to select a web host, how to set up SSL, how to use CSS to make the website look the way they want?
They won't. That's why Wordpress, and later Facebook, won the online publishing wars.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#54Markdown came to be as input for generating HTML, so I don't see why the suggestion is so controversial to some?
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#55HTML 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…
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Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#56One could use Apache2 .htaccess to set up a directory header/footer which load a script (hidden from listing in .htaccess) which parses a .md file listing into a list of articles, and fetches a couple of the first ones as a front page. Then just use a URL fragment to track which article is open, and fetch & render that article’s markdown fully onto the page.
Disable JS and you have a list of markdown files. Enable JS and get a website.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#57This 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 everythin…
> There are many flavors of markdown. We'd need a standards body, compatibility suites, etc., and for all the browser vendors to adopt it.
Yes please. Perfect: to want something that can be done; to need something that can happen.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 learni…
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Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 learni…
If say 10% of the pool of internet users at the time could make an HTML page on Geocities, what % of today’s pool of internet users could do it? The pool has gotten much larger and much less tech savvy on average.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#60Yes, we should have open standards for content-types and dynamic fetching and updating of code from trusted locations on the network. Then the browser itself becomes little more than a container for executing rendering code, with plugins for every content-type under the sun. But we are on a different timeline.
With WASM, this may yet still happen.