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We should have Markdown-rendered websites

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181–190 of 351 posts

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#181
Two problems:

Most people don't want the simple websites you could render in basic Markdown, that's why we don't have more of them already. How many of the top 1000 websites are a column of text and nothing else?

If most people wanted simple websites, they would write them with a WYSIWYG editor, they would not learn Markdown.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#182
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…

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 - th…

Markdown is undoubtedly more readable, but HTML can be more readable than most people make it. And considering that the ultimate goal is to wind up with a layed-out, styled document, its capabilities in that regard are just plain-old more important, especially since markdown isn't going to replace WYSIWYG editors any time soon, and almost everybody who needs to know HTML can learn it relatively easily. Browsers collapse white space by default, so you've got a lot of flexibility with its formatting:

    

    
        Page Title
    

    
        Page Title
    

    

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum.

Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam. Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

--or--

    

        Page Title    
           Page Title    

    

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum.

Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam. Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

I get why many developers like this idea... Web developers are responsible for implementing the complex user-facing parts, and their primary weapon is text: doing extra work sucks, and when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But developers are not designers, and design not being left to developers in mature organizations is no accident. Absolute, deliberate, limiting simplicity is always an attractive argument if you dismiss the value of, or maybe don't even understand the reason for the complexity. I won't deny the advantages of reader-view-level simplicity in web design: it's easier to visually parse, more performant, and easier to navigate compared to most web pages, similar to how books compare to magazines-- but about 225 million people per year in the US read magazines and I assure you most of them would not choose to have textural printouts in lieu of their current form. While people like having the option of a uniform, grey, easily visually parseable mode to view webpages, that's probably not what they want even most of the time, let alone as a deliberate limitation.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

—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…

As far as I’m aware, you can write any HTML in Markdown, and it will be rendered normally. So Markdown can indeed contain any and all HTML. HTML can’t contain Markdown at all - a ### in HTML does nothing but a hello in Markdown does exactly what you expect it to.

A ### in Markdown doesn't "do" anything either, the reader just has to know that it denotes a 3rd level heading.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal preference would be GitHub flavored markdown, since as a coder it includes a lot of very useful non-standard markups. The compromises it makes on the non-deterministic markup elements are acceptable as well.

I think this makes sense. Many of the GitHub readmes are in markdown already, so people are quite familiar with it and there might already be an open source package that renders it out…

In fact, github itself can already render it out. Markdown based websites hosted for free on github: https://www.markdownguide.org/tools/github-pages/

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#185
post #2

FWIW, just a couple of weeks ago we started doing that for a new sqlite subproject: https://sqlite.org/wasm With the exception of one page, all of them are markdown, rendered on demand by the Fossil SCM. The one exception is an HTML file, which we need in order to host a small JS application.

When you say rendered on demand, you mean by the client, as in a page request? Why not just rerender to HTML on developer change? Genuinely curious why rendering on demand is preferred in this case.

Maybe they cache the rendered version? This would keep rendering to a minimum

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - th…

> tags have the same visual weight as the text they're delimiting IMO this issue should and can be easily solved by editor/viewer by rendering tags with lower contrast.

Yes, that's a perfectly viable workaround, but it's still a band-aid that requires expending resources that wouldn't need to be spent if the markup method had been better chosen for readability. (To be specific, I believe the angle-brackets are the main culprit.)

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#188
It most certainly would not be a bad idea to have .md files render natively in a browser. Browsers also natively render images, videos, PDFs.

That said, the idea that this somehow changes any dynamic on the web are mere fantasies. The masses self-publish on social networks. On their phones. And not even that, as most largely lure.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - th…

Markdown is undoubtedly more readable, but HTML can be more readable than most people make it. And considering that the ultimate goal is to wind up with a layed-out, styled document, its capabilities in that regard are just plain-old more important, especially since markdown isn't going to replace WYSIWYG editors any time soon, and almost everybody who needs to know HTML can learn it relatively easily. Browsers colla…

I may be that rare exception - a hobbyist developer who does design work as part of $dayjob.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#190
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…

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 - th…

IMO the main issue with writing HTML is it takes a two-armed key-chord to do a char.
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