Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We should have Markdown-rendered websites

ipfs.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 351 posts

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#261

Post by TOGoS »

varispeed wrote: post #91

Can someone explain what is the point of ipfs? I visited the homepage and it mostly shows an information about what it is not and disadvantages of things that are not ipfs. But I am struggling to understand why would I want to use it and how? For instance, can I host a website on it? Can I put a wordpress on it? How can I share my website with someone? Can I use my own domain? Or is it like FTP? I really don't get it…

It's a distributed content-addressed datastore, like Git or Bittorrent or Gnutella or Freenet, but maybe trying harder than any of those to be a direct replacement for web servers. I think they aim to make "ipfs://whatever"[1] a URI scheme that's supported in web browsers alongside "http://whatever".

[1] I can't find the page explaining the URI scheme, but as I recall the double-slash felt vaguely out-of-place when I did once upon a time read it, and I have never been able to take the project as seriously as it seems to want to be taken (flashy website with 'whitepaper' etc) partly because of that detail. The underlying idea about a distributed content-address datastore is a good one, but I feel like they're making it more complicated than it needs to be. https://www.nuke24.net/docs/2015/HashURNs.html is somewhat a response to it.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#262

Post by necovek »

pessimizer wrote: post #198
greenthrow wrote: post #111

Earlier 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.

> the big innovation that your profile had to be your real life identity early on. This came after facebook was wildly successful, so not early on. I also have never met a single person who was attracted by it, or was confused as to who their friends were before it existed. That being said, tying real names to online identity allowed facebook to buy data from brokers to fill out the sliced up audiences they sell to a…

> This came after facebook was wildly successful

Official requirement came later, but people were de facto using their true identities in large numbers, which allowed to find old friends and family easily.

You know, the fact that it invites you to consider it a "yearbook" of sorts.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#263

Post by chrismorgan »

zzo38computer wrote: post #165
robocat wrote: post #139

Deliver as markdown, but with a single line header: Foo [[insert your markdown here]] A document delivered as pure markdown, that will get spidered by any search engine that renders JavaScript (or that reads the document as text), and you don’t need to ask anyone to change anything. HTML has no closing end tag, so markdown can be free-form and securely include any unescaped ”’ characters (raw HTML code) you need into…

What is needing then, is adding the "type" attribute in command, that browsers with their own implementation can optionally use it instead in order to render with the user's settings if desired. However, that still forces you to serve HTML, so it is not good. My idea is adding a "Interpreter" response header, which indicates which files can be used to render files (documents, audio, video, pictures, etc) that the cli…

Fun related fact people may not be aware of: you can do basically this with arbitrary XML files, defining a stylesheet which transforms the XML into HTML however you like using XSLT. As an example, Atom feeds on my website (such as https://chrismorgan.info/blog/tags/meta/feed.xml>) render just fine in all mainstream browsers, thanks to this processing instruction at the start of the file:
(Mind you, XML is hard to work with in browsers, because it’s been only minimally maintained for the last twenty or so years. Error handling is atrocious (e.g. largely not giving you any stack trace or equivalent, or emitting errors only to stdout), documentation is lousy, some features you’d have expected from what the specs say are simply unsupported, and there are behavioural bugs all over the place, e.g. in Firefox loading any of my feeds that also fetch resources from other origins will occasionally just hang, and you’ll have to reload the page to get it to render; and if you reload the page, you’ll have to close and reopen the dev tools for them to continue working.)

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#264

Post by enos_feedler »

graypegg wrote: post #63
enos_feedler wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If say 10% of the pool of internet users at the time could make an HTML page on Geocities, what % of today’s pool of internet users could do it? The pool has gotten much larger and much less tech savvy on average.

Well I guess the next logical question is what % would not make an HTML page, but would make a Markdown page. I feel like the Venn diagram is nearly a circle, but I don’t have anything to back that up. To most people, symbols and words being “special” in some text = coding, I’m still not convinced that the cognitive load of: # my title Is different than my title

Its true. As another commenter said the baseline now is writing content into a social network and let it do all the work or use a GUI

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#265

Post by _ZeD_ »

the_af wrote: post #260

I see some people in multiple comments discussing the need for some sort of standard for markdown if it were to be used for (goals...). Does nobody else remember the debacle and (limited) fight between Jeff Atwood and John Gruber (markdown's creator) over this? It was a big deal here, and of course, over at Coding Horror, Atwood's blog. And the reason was: Atwood was calling for some kind of standard, and Gruber acti…

I'll just ignore Gruber... his sloppyness in defining the details created a myriad of dialects of markdown

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#266

Post by piskerpan »

BeefWellington wrote: post #11
falcolas wrote: post #5

OK. Which flavor of markdown should we get every browser manufacturer to use?

I made a comment about how to do this as my very first HN post on this account[1] in a code-golf-y sort of thread: Here's the example: # Markdown header ## Subheader ### Section header 1. Numbered 1. List - Unordered - List [//]: # ( var doc = document.children[0].textContent.split('\n'); md = doc.slice(0, doc.length - 1).join("\n"); document.body.innerHTML = marked(md); Now, whether this is wise to encourage or not…

Nice! You don't need the HTML and BODY tags though.

I think however this defeats the purpose: yes you're delivering the content as Markdown, but you have to deliver it as `text/html` for it to be rendered, so anyone fetching it can't tell it's Markdown content. Also every document has to have (invisible-ish) HTML junk appended

A "better" solution would be a browser that sends the `Accept: text/markdown, text/html` header and a server that serves Markdown only when requested.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#267

Post by dredmorbius »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #109

Markdown having *italics* _italics_ **bold** __bold__ instead of _italics_ *bold* was such a mistake. No idea how non-technical people were ever supposed to grasp that.

Agreed.

So does John McFarlane, the author of djot (and perhaps more widely known, Pandoc):

https://github.com/jgm/djot>

My own convention when writing Markdown is to use single underbar for _italic_ and doubled star for **bold**. Except of course on GlitchSoc (a Mastodon server), where underbars give underscores, and single or doubled stars are for italic / bold respectively.

But otherwise, if I see a singleton star or doubled underbar in my own writing, I'm pretty sure I've typoed something.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#268

Post by irrational »

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…

LOL. Apparently I am old, but I remember the web before Facebook (or Google or…) existed. Everybody could (and many did) write on the web before Facebook. Geocities, My Space, or just create your own website. Believe it or not, but it was far simpler and cheaper to create your own website back then. There were tons of free hosting sites back then. You know what killed all of that? Facebook. This is why I am excited by the notion of Facebook dying. Maybe we can get back some of what we lost.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#269

Post by SoftTalker »

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.

You can get good looking "plain" html (i.e. readable margins, linespacing, fonts and text size) with a very tiny amount of CSS.

Re: We should have Markdown-rendered websites

#270

Post by SoftTalker »

rcarmo wrote: post #216
LAC-Tech wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemtext is a bit less capable than markdown, isn't it? IE there's no inline images.

There are, but the markup is too simple and too "pure" to be useful in any meaningful way.

That's just an opinion. The reason nobody (relatively speaking) uses Markdown to author web pages is also that it's too simple to be useful.
Post reply on HN