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We should have Markdown-rendered websites

ipfs.io

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Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#101

Post by 6502nerdface »

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…

Interestingly, your comment is very similar to the Gemini FAQ "2.9 Why didn't you just use Markdown instead of defining text/gemini?" [1]

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#102

Post by uses »

HTML / CSS ended up being extremely granular and hackable while missing the big building blocks that would have readily matched the structure of the web - things like navigation menus or page outlines. We waited over a decade for the layout systems to catch up to developer needs while creating buggy float-based grids. It's an outlier that media queries were already in widespread availability when mobile really started picking up.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#103

Post by cxr »

madeofpalk wrote: post #85
ElevenLathe wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

you can distribute websites as markdown! Return markdown with a plain text content type and it'll show as markdown, which was designed to look good as-is and not require rendering to HTML

Markdown is supposed to (be able to) look good as-is. Most people's Markdown doesn't look good as-is, though. They target the GitHub renderer and come from the GitHub-listing-as-a-product-landing-page school of thought, so even project READMEs are generally a mess.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#104

Post by The_Colonel »

bachmeier wrote: post #90
jerf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CommonMark seems like the obvious choice: https://commonmark.org/ It isn't as supported as I'd like, but it does exist and I've encountered it "in the wild" a few times, so it's not just some guy typing away on a website either.

After all these years, I still haven't found an important argument in favor of CommonMark. As I point out every time someone presents it as the answer, it doesn't handle things like math, so you still need to use unstandardized extensions, making the whole thing pointless.

Forget math, CommonMark doesn't even handle tables.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#105

Post by jrm4 »

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…

I can't meaningfully distinguish any of these criticisms from some you could have made about HTML earlier. None of these are deal-killers.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#108

Post by jrm4 »

People are "big-picture" missing why this is an important idea. I had a prof put it like this once: The great tragedy of the web is the following:

HTML made the web easy to read.

But you know what made the web easy to write? Facebook. Facebook was undeniably the technology that made it so that roughly everybody could write things on the web to be read by everyone.

I really like the direction of this, because it points toward the possibility of a "web that is easy to write."

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