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We should have Markdown-rendered websites

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Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#141

Post by jrochkind1 »

xigoi wrote: post #131
jrochkind1 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I was thinking of a mode that the _page source code_ would trigger somehow, instead of the client triggering on a page that was possibly written to be full of complex CSS and JS. But also, maybe? It does seem related to OP. I am just brainstorming, don't have anything particularly thought out. I don't personally use any "reader mode" much.

Such a mode would be… a CSS stylesheet.

Well, that's one possibility.

I am imagining instead a mode that tells the user-agent "Use your own standard HTML stylesheet, and it's allowed to change and be updated over the years, to fix bugs and improve design, you don't have to stick with your default styles from 30 years ago,' but "use the same stylesheet you are using for other pages in this mode, I don't want to have to come up with it, and I don't want it to be fixed in time to what I come up with today either or require my maintenance"

That is, i suppose, more like "reader/readability mode" in all those aspects--but triggered by the source instead of by the user.

But, sure, a CSS stylesheet is another thing. I'm just thinking around the use cases I think OP is setting out; you can do so too, with other suggestions, you don't have to try telling me I mean something other than I mean to do so!

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#142

Post by nine_k »

jmull wrote: post #48

This 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…

Markdown-based web is actually easy to try.

There is a number of browser extensions that render Markdown nicely. Install one, and get your friends do the same.

Make your web server serve markdown files with a Content-Type: text/markdown or even text/plain header. Put some Markdown files there.

Enjoy. It should just work.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#143

Post by v3ss0n »

seized wrote: post #138
coldtea wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Except that CommonMark has its own very annoying things. Like loose lists. Multiple lists of bullet points ends up an ugly mess with CommonMark.

Can you give me an example?

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#145

Post by rroot »

The majority of the content you read on the web is there to lure your retinas so the website can shove sponsored photons into them.

The goal of de-cluttered web is nice. But if clutter is even just a notch more profitable, that ain't going to happen.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#146

Post by hinkley »

jayd16 wrote: post #75
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

You can do all that in a markdown page just fine, no? Can't you throw a tracking pixel in markdown?

The cynic in me says you could do this even easier in markdown because you're post-processing all of the content.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#147

Post by RajT88 »

Agree with many folks here:

Markdown is not sufficient for the task of expressing the modern web.

All that said... We shouldn't stop thinking of ways to reimagine what the WWW actually is.

Why not create a new web-browsery thing which uses a totally different language, totally different paradigm for composition, heck why not a totally different network transport?

If you think that sounds dumb...I just described the current state of Netflix.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#148

Post by colmmacc »

This reminded me that a long time ago I used S3 website's error handling feature so that S3 could render simple markdown files as HTML natively: http://composedit.net/

http://composedit.net/dickens is actually a 404 error that fetches http://composedit.net/text/dickens.md and uses Javascript to render it. Unbelievably dumb but works. Serverless before there was serverless!

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#150

Post by nwienert »

fiedzia wrote: post #116
bccdee wrote: post #70

Markdown 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…

Plain HTML would be great, its just browsers holding it back. Without CSS, it looks unacceptably ugly.

just hit reader mode
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