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We should have Markdown-rendered websites

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Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#111

Post by greenthrow »

jrm4 wrote: post #108

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 point…

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.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#112

Post by timdaub »

douglaswlance wrote: post #83

You already can render markdown. It shows as what it is: text. If you want to render markdown as something else, you need to define what that other thing is. If you're suggesting we render it as a webpage, well webpages are made of HTML and CSS--so you're saying you want to render markdown as HTML/CSS. We can already do that. There are a plethora of tools available to do that.

HTML is also plain text. The blog posts defines it. Pretty render md to a perfectly readable text like reader mode on all browers and aspect ratios.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#113

Post by timdaub »

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…

Alphabet is a 1T USD market cap, I‘m confident they could finance implementing 3-5 flavors.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#114

Post by jrm4 »

greenthrow wrote: post #111
jrm4 wrote: post #108

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 point…

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)

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#116

Post by fiedzia »

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.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#117

Post by jrochkind1 »

xigoi wrote: post #39
jrochkind1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, original HTML was not too different than markdown really. (But more standard, and slightly more powerful with things like tables, code blocks, and definition lists, all of which are only non-standard extensions to markdown!) Maybe what OP really wants is a lot more people to write HTML without _any_ CSS or Javascript. But that's already more or less available, so there are reasons people don't do it to grappl…

> Perhaps a mode where you tell the browser to ignore any CSS or Javascript; possibly also in this mode the browser could use better more readable standard html rendering, similar to what most markdown renderers choose by default (bigger font sizes and line-height, more and more even whitspace around headings, maximum page width, etc), instead of the legacy choices they are now sticking with for backwards compat. Isn…

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.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#118

Post by robocat »

If Google upranked “documents” (simple HTML content without JavaScript), then there would be an incentive to publish simple content.

Instead Google goes to insane lengths to parse JavaScript generated abominations, and otherwise allow/encourage shitty content.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#120

Post by merb »

6502nerdface wrote: post #101
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

https://xkcd.com/927/
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