This is a great idea. First browser that implements this natively gets my vote!
We should have Markdown-rendered websites
121–130 of 351 posts
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#122I've seen a few people on here recommending everything from "just use HTML" (which misses the point) to "just use Gemini" (which misses the point even more). Why not HTML? Why not Markdown? They aren't self-contained. * A web page written in either format can leak your IP address to external bad actors because of the way inline images work. * Loading resources from more than one server is a reliability and security p…
Edge (the version that was killed) was able to read epubs. I quite liked that feature. Now I just use an e-reader or pdf
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#123This convo reminds me of MDX -- https://mdxjs.com/ -- allows you to mix JSX with markdown, popular for making documentation pages for design systems.
A lot of the limitations of MD mentioned here are alleviated by allowing arbitrary JSX, which of course is optional for users who want something more basic.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#124This 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.
Well, if it were to be adopted by vendors, the many flavors would be a non-problem. They can just agree on a flavor and be down with it. There's CommonMark anyway, they can just use that.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is nonsense. There were tons of things that made the web easy to write before FB. That is not what made FB successful. It was a combination of a lot of little features plus the big innovation that your profile had to be your real life identity early on. That was the thing prior social networks didn't do. It enabled the uniquely Facebook experience of being able to find past friends and more distant family.
What technology IN REALITY, raw numbers, got more people to "type something into their computer for the purpose of multiple other people to read?" Facebook, and nothing else much comes close. (Again, I say this as someone who mostly hates it)
Now you're moving the goalpost. You originally implied FB making the web easy to write was the major innovation that lead to its success. I pointed out that simply giving people a dirt simple text box had been done many times before. There was nothing special about that part of FB.
I am not dumb enough to argue that FB wasn't hugely successful, so your attempt to shift the argument away from your original point is silly.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#126This 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…
I get this, but OTOH it is IMO best to distribute digital artifacts in the format that is most useful for editing or creating derivative works. This is the free software philosophy but also a societal good. Many of us learned HTML and web technologies by reading the source code of websites, and we've closed that door behind us with all of the build steps that turn our actual code into a computer-readable-only mess wh…
>Many of us learned HTML and web technologies by reading the source code of websites
HTML is an extensible language. Markdown is not.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#127Markdown is a convenient but deeply limited markup language with only a small subset of html's features. And yes, limitations are good because we want documents not web apps, etc, etc, but I mean "images can't have captions" limited, "navigation bars don't exist" limited. Actual important features of html don't exist in markdown, which is why almost every markdown platform ends up adding extensions and shortcodes. Wh…
The fatal flaw of HTML (and XML for that matter) is that the tags have the same visual weight as the text they're delimiting, which makes for a sense of clutter even in your minimal example.
Markdown really scores here, by having a pleasing plain text representation as a goal from the outset, and I've love to see it used more widely for web pages.
I'd also love to see it more widely used for offline reading, too - the help files in an application really shouldn't need to invoke a web browser to view them when a lightweight markdown viewer would do the job. Not that there is a lightweight markdown viewer, mind you!
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#128I've seen a few people on here recommending everything from "just use HTML" (which misses the point) to "just use Gemini" (which misses the point even more). Why not HTML? Why not Markdown? They aren't self-contained. * A web page written in either format can leak your IP address to external bad actors because of the way inline images work. * Loading resources from more than one server is a reliability and security p…
Self-containment is entirely unrelated to a format. You could do self-contained markdown, HTML or anything else if you wanted to.
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#129Reminds me of some related ideas I had: https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet
Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites
#130Markdown is a convenient but deeply limited markup language with only a small subset of html's features. And yes, limitations are good because we want documents not web apps, etc, etc, but I mean "images can't have captions" limited, "navigation bars don't exist" limited. Actual important features of html don't exist in markdown, which is why almost every markdown platform ends up adding extensions and shortcodes. Wh…
Exactly what I was thinking, by omitting the and HTML can be quite concise [1]. Additionally the closing can be omitted from lists and barely a step over using - for bullet points.
The worst part about HTML is the links, though. Anchor tags are awful. Having to repeatedly type and closing with is wayyy too boilerplate much for for something that is simply surrounded with [square](brackets) in markdown.
[1] I go to https://meiert.com/en/blog/optional-html/ for reference.