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We should have Markdown-rendered websites

• ilaksh 4y ago
  Reminds me of some related ideas I had: https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet
• dreadlordbone 4y ago
  I would love to use more markdown but I need multidimensional layouts decided by the author (variable columns with text and images) and I haven't seen anything like this.
• rroot 4y ago
  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.
• avsteele 4y ago
  I love this idea. Hope it gets some traction!
• timdaub 4y ago
  markdown is not a markup
• sgbeal 4y ago
  FWIW, just a couple of weeks ago we started doing that for a new sqlite subproject: https://sqlite.org/wasm 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.
  • another_story 4y ago
    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.
    • twobitshifter 4y ago
      Maybe they cache the rendered version? This would keep rendering to a minimum
    • sgbeal 4y ago
      > ... as in a page request? Yup. > Why not just rerender to HTML on developer change? Because that's not how the Fossil SCM renders content. It has a cache, but only for certain high-CPU data like generation of zip files of the source tree. Caching markdown docs wouldn't work in all cases, anyway: when you link to a ticket, for example, it gets rendered differently depending on whether it's opened or closed. Thus the renderer has to know the current status of any fossil-internal constructs a doc links to. Of course, we could say "just update the cache of all docs which link to a ticket every time the ticket is updated," but That Way Lies Madness. In an Enterprise-level system that would possibly be worth doing. For the Fossil SCM it's overkill. Though re-rendering on every page hit _sounds_ bad, we've been doing it in the Fossil SCM since it went into being and it has never caused us any undue performance issues. Every doc you see on <https://fossil-scm.org/home https://fossil-scm.org/home>, as opposed to the non-doc URIs, is served directly from the SCM db and all (or very close to all) of it is either markdown or Fossil's older/original wiki format, both rendered on demand. CPU load is minimal and rendering is "fast enough" for everything we've ever done with it.
      • another_story 4y ago
        Well, the more you know. Thanks for the detailed reply.
• timdaub 4y ago
  If you're interested in the history of why I wrote this article, then it originated from this Twitter thread: https://nitter.net/timdaub/status/1590731949433573377 https://nitter.net/timdaub/status/1590731949433573377
  • nelsondev 4y ago
    I think addressing the concern around Markdown flavors would improve the argument.
    • timdaub 4y ago
      ok thanks I'll inform myself and think about this a bit more. I wasn't aware flavors would lead to controversy but it makes sense.
• danielvaughn 4y ago
  There’s prose.io which basically does this http://prose.io/ http://prose.io/
  • satvikpendem 4y ago
    See also https://prose.sh https://prose.sh (I guess `prose` is a popular name in this space) and https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev.
• falcolas 4y ago
  OK. Which flavor of markdown should we get every browser manufacturer to use?
  • djbusby 4y ago
    Asciidoc.
    • GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
      > AsciiDoc is a plain text markup language for writing technical content. It’s packed with semantic elements and equipped with features to modularize and reuse content. Isn't that the opposite of Markdown?
      • maximus-decimus 4y ago
        It's basically a dsl to generate markdown. People who propose replacing markdown with AsciiDoc completely miss the point of Markdown in my opinion.
        • pessimizer 4y ago
          Asciidoc is not in any way a dsl to generate markdown. Being far more expressive than markdown would obviously prevent that.
  • BeefWellington 4y ago
    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 [//]: # (<html><body></body><script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/marked/marked.min.js"></script><script>var doc = document.children[0].textContent.split('\n'); md = doc.slice(0, doc.length - 1).join("\n"); document.body.innerHTML = marked(md);</script></html><!--) Now, whether this is wise to encourage or not I can't speak to. It would be great if browsers parsed markdown as text-only [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25352385#25355751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25352385#25355751
• therobot24 4y ago
  isn't this why HTML was invented? agree that it'd be nice to have a markdown file be rendered inherently within the browser so i don't have to use haroopad on my windows machine, but it feels like we're just going to reinvent HTML
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    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 grapple with. 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.
    • xigoi 4y ago
      > 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't that just Reader Mode?
      • jrochkind1 4y ago
        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.
• dgan 4y ago
  why not OrgMode websites? it handles tables too!
• satvikpendem 4y ago
  Recently there was a thread about GitHub Blocks, interactive elements within READMEs and Markdown files in general. If we could standardize that and support it, that would be cool. Also, isn't this basically what HTML does anyway?
  • toastal 4y ago
    You mean stuff that is already standardized and in Asciidoctor? That would be easier than trying to wrangle in all of these forks/flavors with all their incompatible extensions and tools all while have no way to handle metadata?
• PainfullyNormal 4y ago
  It's been 10 years since Zed Shaw suggested a <markdown/> tag. clean speech warning: swearing. https://youtu.be/_CEBG_s92P8?t=398 https://youtu.be/_CEBG_s92P8?t=398
• sxp 4y ago
  Part of the benefit of Markdown is that you can view the raw source and still get useful info out of it. But this site prerendered the Markdown and served HTML which defeats part of the purpose. A better option would be to use something like https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ and serve the MD/HTML file. Then you can get a client-rendered HTML (https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html) or view the raw MD (https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html?noformat https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html?noforma...) if the browser doesn't support HTML. Markdeep is good at progressively mixing HTML & MD so you can choose how much of each to put in to your page. I use it for mostly MD + MathJax notes + some HTML/JS/SVG/Canvas/WebGL for when I want dynamic graphics in my notes.
  • mutant 4y ago
    These websites didn't render for shit on my mobile. I had to zoom in and out. I'd never subject a reader to this kind of horrible UI.
• graypegg 4y ago
  HTML is already a markup language. You could just as easily make basic websites using HTML and some basic inline CSS. (They’d even have some extra features missing from Markdown that I’d consider still part of a basic content formatting suite like floating or multi-column layouts. They’d even have a defined standard for machine readable metadata!) The problem is that people don’t make websites like that very often, even though they can. This is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t currently exist.
  • buro9 4y ago
    HTML is a subset of Markdown. You can include in Markdown any and all HTML. What Markdown provides here is an even lower barrier to entry for the majority of people... they just write text, learn a fraction more Markdown to so more... and if they want total control they eventually learn HTML too. It's not mutually exclusive... Markdown includes HTML.
    • graypegg 4y ago
      —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 learning HTML, and those were leagues more advanced than what’s possible with only Markdown! If you want people to be excited about self-publishing online again, it’s probably best to start with the markup language that allows for some fun :)
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • enos_feedler 4y ago
        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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  I spend a good part of my week writing docs. The docs that come out of Markdown are hard to read, hard to maintain, long, ugly, and limited, requiring postprocessing for simple things like a Table of Contents. Websites need content to be even richer than docs (and no, Mr. Developer, what you want is not the sole requirement of the rest of the people on the planet). If you want to make an entire website out of Markdown, make Markdown suck less. I think we need a configuration format for websites. Configuration formats are designed for humans first, and fit to purpose. What might that format require? Probably: style, layout, macros, emeddable objects, inheritable/overrideable values, logic, loops, etc. Basically a DSL. You describe independent blocks (layout, style, content, etc) and the browser takes the instructions and renders the result. Not insanely different in concept than HTML/CSS, but everything could use one common format, in a manner more human-friendly than we have now, content would be independent of form/function, and none of it would inherit some unrelated design principles from some antiquated non-human-friendly technology. text "Employees table description" | This is a description of the employees table. The name and e-mail address are listed to the right. table "Employees" @Name ~> Frank Suzanne Rahul Aman @E-mail address -> frank@me.com suzanne@me.com rahul@me.com aman@me.com style "table.Employees" @Name column bgcolor "green" @"Email address" rows bgcolor "gray" layout "main-page" panel "1" align: left content "text.Employees table description" panel "2" align: right-of "layout.main-page.1" content "table.Employees"
  • jerf 4y ago
    You've described a static site generator, which I mean not as "hey you should have known that" but more as a "good news, that basically exists and you can use it now!" No, there's no standard with static site generator, but there never will be. The combination of the wide variety of needs and use cases and the ease of starting one of these up (I can literally bash together the skeleton of a useful static site generator in 4 hours, and this isn't just "oh I could recreate dropbox in a weekend if I wanted to because I am a swaggering HN programmer", it is something I've literally done rather than sit down and learn someone else's because it was faster to bash something together than read docs) means that there will never be a shortage of these, and none of them will ever managed to capture 99% of the market to become a de facto standard. I basically have websites that work the way the author describes. There's no particular need or benefit from expecting the web browsers to do this. There are disadvantages to this approach but the web browser directly rendering the markdown doesn't really solve any of them.
• hospadar 4y ago
  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
  • timdaub 4y ago
    haha that's definitely a big component of it all. But the engaged clickable web is anyways dead. This post is a static HTML file hosted on IPFS with no back links to my carefully curated blog and media presence. No branding. It's because I've accepted that people's bullshit-radar is sensitive towards overly optimized engagement content. Rather I want my text to be read and those that care will anyways online-search me. It's not my idea btw. The web has reached peak clickability: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/has-the-internet-reached-peak-clickability https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/has-the-internet-reached-pea...
    • rroot 4y ago
      I wasn't going to read that but I did. I kind of agree, but it's "social media" that's dying not the internet. The social media has gone absolutely toxic in an frantic attempt to maximize revenue per user.
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      I think covid is when the internet jumped the shark for Joe Average. You would get banned from twitter, facebook, reddit, instagram etc for saying what was official policy until _yesterday_. The sheer insanity of that policy left the terminally online in charge everywhere and the quality of every website suffered. If I look back to reddit posts which google still brings up more than half the people are banned. These are people who wrote thousand word replies to technical problems and were pillars of the community. The only ones left are the mentally ill unemployed since they are the only ones who have time to keep track of what is allowed there. HN was headed down the same hole until that hilarious post by PG about heretics that got flagged for 8 hours. I imagine at that point it hit everyone in charge here that the people making the most noise were not their friends.
• emrah 4y ago
  Markdown could potentially replace HTML as a more succinct markup language but it's not sufficient by itself because it has no way to represent styling and layout. You'd need to jam CSS into it somehow
• Kalanos 4y ago
  i made https://aiqc.io https://aiqc.io with readthedocs/sphinx, but wound up doing most pages in html anyways
• xigoi 4y ago
  Gemini. You're describing Gemini. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
  • LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Gemtext is a bit less capable than markdown, isn't it? IE there's no inline images.
    • xigoi 4y ago
      The whole point is that the client decides the presentation. If it wants to display images as inline, it will, if not, it won't.
      • LAC-Tech 4y ago
        Right, I guess the gemini browsers I tried did not display them inline.
        • xigoi 4y ago
          I think Lagrange (the fanciest Gemini browser I know of) has the option to do that.
    • rcarmo 4y ago
      There are, but the markup is too simple and too "pure" to be useful in any meaningful way.
      • qudat 4y ago
        It’s great for journals and people that like to tinker with a simple spec. I wrote a similar spec for lists: https://lists.sh/spec https://lists.sh/spec The renderer is crazy simple when you can figure out the type by reading the first 4 chars of each line.
      • SoftTalker 4y ago
• pie_flavor 4y ago
  > We really need a new publishing tool for everyone that doesn't require intricate knowledge of how the entire web computing stack functions. That tool is called HTML. It is usually supplemented by CSS. Every Markdown element has a one-to-one translation to it. This webpage is a particular stylesheet, plus basic HTML elements that you could write in <> style just as easily as you could write them in *_# style. If HTML requires particular defaults to look right, then that is a really great reason to fix the defaults, but not a really great reason to junk the whole thing and start over. Markdown isn't particularly good, it isn't particularly standardized, and it isn't even compatible with reader mode (e.g. images). Just write HTML. Browser standards have not degraded to the point that you need to write a web page differently than people wrote them fifteen years ago for it to look the same; a toolbox with a million complicated tools and one obvious screwdriver is not a toolbox that makes it very hard to unscrew screws. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Shtirlic 4y ago
  It's already done in Gemini protocol with Gemtext format (https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi)
  • mdaniel 4y ago
    > This is the only supported list syntax. Using - instead of * like in Markdown will not do anything. Nested lists are not supported. yeah, no. I can't tell if this is some kind of parody or what
• corysama 4y ago
  So, https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ ?
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  Don't forget that markup refers to the document's formatting and markdown is a specific markup library that converts text-to-HTML. So technically all browsers do support markdown. We should re-visit the actual term "mark-up" which refers to decorating copy during the editing phase. I think many people agree that using markdown to "mark-up" copy on websites is easier. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
• joshmarinacci 4y ago
  What you are describing is a technical solution to a business and social problem. It won’t actually solve what you think it will.
  • jaffathecake 4y ago
    Completely agree. It's already pretty easy to create a nice readable page with an off-the-shelf stylesheet & semantic markup. Sites choose not to do that, for non-technical reasons. For all it's faults, this is partially what AMP aimed to solve, by restricting what developers could do. However, developers/businesses didn't adopt AMP because it was a better user experience, they adopted it because it got them higher up in Google search.
• jmull 4y ago
  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 everything else it takes to develop, publish, and maintain a site. And it resolves the markdown flavors issue. The thing is, people could choose to publish, simple uncomplicated sites now -- it would be cheap and easy, too. The HTML is barely more complicated than the equivalent markdown, and it would take a few lines of CSS to apply a basic style. The many sites that choose to be complicated, cluttered, and expensive will continue to be so, for the same reasons they are now. Markdown would just be another way to build simple sites, which they don't want.
  • ajkjk 4y ago
    > There are many flavors of markdown. We'd need a standards body, compatibility suites, etc., and for all the browser vendors to adopt it. Yes please. Perfect: to want something that can be done; to need something that can happen.
  • ElevenLathe 4y ago
    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 which we send out for consumption by normal users' browsers. It would be nice if "view source" showed you something like what the author actually wrote in their text editor.
    • madeofpalk 4y ago
      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
• cryptos 4y ago
  While I consider it a bit unrealistic to follow this approach in a big style, I like the idea. However, I would suggest to use asciidoc instead, since markdown is a bit to constrained. For examples image captions or tables are not possible in markdown.
• rchaud 4y ago
  Just use a Markdown-based CMS like Pico. Free, open-source, and uses Twig templating.
• blipmusic 4y ago
  Markdown came to be as input for generating HTML, so I don't see why the suggestion is so controversial to some? https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ Also, as already mentioned, Gemini protocol does exist.
• eurasiantiger 4y ago
  One could use Apache2 .htaccess to set up a directory header/footer which load a script (hidden from listing in .htaccess) which parses a .md file listing into a list of articles, and fetches a couple of the first ones as a front page. Then just use a URL fragment to track which article is open, and fetch & render that article’s markdown fully onto the page. Disable JS and you have a list of markdown files. Enable JS and get a website.
• gjvc 4y ago
  Yes, we should have open standards for content-types and dynamic fetching and updating of code from trusted locations on the network. Then the browser itself becomes little more than a container for executing rendering code, with plugins for every content-type under the sun. But we are on a different timeline. With WASM, this may yet still happen.
• thih9 4y ago
  Functionally this seems like reinventing RSS. And I’d say it’s about time.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ape4 4y ago
  That page has <link rel="stylesheet" href="/katex.min.css"> <script src="http://localhost:8888"></script> The .css file doesn't exist and what's with the localhost access?
• bccdee 4y ago
  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. Why use markdown at all? Just use html. "But html isn't style-agnostic" yes it is. CSS isn't style-agnostic. Instead of a markdown browser, how about a browser with a fixed stylesheet and no js? You don't even need a browser for that, that could just be a userscript that gets plugged into an existing browser. It'd break non-compliant websites that require javascript or custom css, but so would a markdown browser. Most people wouldn't write content for it, but most people wouldn't write content for a markdown browser either. "But html is cluttered" it doesn't have to be. This is a valid webpage: <!doctype html> <title>Page Title</title> <h1>Page Title</h1> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum. <p>Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam. Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales. Personally, I prefer writing in markdown, but that's no reason to insert a markdown renderer into browsers. HTML can already be as sleek and readable as you want. If we added a new type of markup for anybody with a personal preference, we'd never stop.
  • fiedzia 4y ago
    Plain HTML would be great, its just browsers holding it back. Without CSS, it looks unacceptably ugly.
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      You can get good looking "plain" html (i.e. readable margins, linespacing, fonts and text size) with a very tiny amount of CSS.
    • nwienert 4y ago
      just hit reader mode
      • 4y ago
• awinter-py 4y ago
  I mean rendering JSX would be incredible from a 'I hate waiting for build' perspective babel has a trick where you load their JS and mark your <script type="text/jsx">, but it is slow AF more generally, pluggable templating / rendering engines would be neat
• pclmulqdq 4y ago
  We already do. They use static site generators to produce HTML (a good interchange format) from a customized form of markdown (which is not standardized at all and very customizable). This state of the world is totally fine - it works well for both viewers and content producers.
  • proser 4y ago
    This gets at the key difference between the two. Markdown is for authoring and HTML is for presentation.
• caseyf 4y ago
  er if we are talking about creating documents without CSS and JS, HTML is way better than Markdown
• cto_official 4y ago
  I think the problem is correct, but the solution of markdown is not.
• samatman 4y ago
  As a compromise, might I suggest: <markdown class="commonmark"> <![CDATA[ # It's Markdown! Sure _is_ ]]> </markdown>
• forgotmypw17 4y ago
  Markdown results in unintentional formatting more frequently than not in my experience, and it is this reason alone that I avoid it anywhere I have a choice to, including any software I implement.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• douglaswlance 4y ago
  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.
  • timdaub 4y ago
    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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• notriddle 4y ago
  I've seen a few people on here recommending everything from "just use HTML" (which misses the point) to "just use Gemini" (which misses the point even more). Why not HTML? Why not Markdown? They aren't self-contained. * A web page written in either format can leak your IP address to external bad actors because of the way inline images work. * Loading resources from more than one server is a reliability and security problem, and it performs bad on initial load (it's great for subsequent loads, since external resources can be cached, but initial load time is bad and tech designers should really spend more time thinking about worst-case perf than about average-case). * Downloading a web page is overly complicated. I should be able to download a page to my computer and never have to worry about the origin server going away, and that's not possible on the HTML5 web. This is one of the main reasons for the enduring popularity of PDF. IPFS, in particular, would benefit from a self-contained document format, because it needs to know the full set of dependencies in order to pin a page as a whole, and ensure that you don't accidentally pin an HTML file without pinning its images and wind up with a broken site. Sure, you can make HTML pages that are self-contained, but because they aren't always, people don't build workflows around them. Why not Gemtext/Gemini? * Nobody but nostalgic nerds cares about simplicity of implementation. I mean, come on, Markdown is even harder to parse than HTML is! Nostalgic nerds might be a worthwhile demographic to appeal to, but I think IPFS wants a wider audience than that. * Inline images are not optional. Too many great creators with a lot of worthwhile things to say are either creative artists or technical artists. In the BBS era before inline images were practical, it didn't stop people from drawing; they just relied in ANSI and ASCII art, and "let's go back to typewriter art" only appeals to nostalgic nerds. * And once you have inline images, you have to offer rich text layout features like tables, otherwise people will start posting pictures of text to work around your missing features (which sucks for either accessibility, because blind people can't read them, or it sucks for simplicity, because deploying OCR is even more complicated than just offering decent text layout). If I had to pick something? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB * You can download an EPUB, and when the original host goes away, it still works! Pinning an EPUB in something like IPFS can work without requiring the CDN to know anything about the file format, since EPUBs are self-contained. * Tooling already exists. It's just XHTML in a ZIP file anyway, but there's also EPUB-specific tooling (for example, the Texinfo release announcement a few days ago mentioned that you can export EPUBs from GNU info manuals). * It supports text and image layouts that writers demand. * There is one standard.
• e40 4y ago
  Website is broken, but I infer from the comments that this would fit the bill: https://github.com/DannyBen/madness/ https://github.com/DannyBen/madness/ My company uses it internally for a load of things. I love writing in MD and pushing to gerrit and when it is submitted the change is live.
• fasteo 4y ago
  ... so that in 10 years Markdown will become the same clusterf*ck as HTML is today
• varispeed 4y ago
  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 and feels like I am missing out.
  • TOGoS 4y ago
    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 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 https://www.nuke24.net/docs/2015/HashURNs.html is somewhat a response to it.
• donatj 4y ago
  You could presumably just add a single line of JS to a markdown file that would render it as HTML.
  • yasenn 4y ago
    There is strapdown: https://github.com/chaitin/strapdown-zeta/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/chaitin/strapdown-zeta/blob/master/README... ``` <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <title>Hello, Strapdown</title> <meta charset="utf-8"> <xmp theme="cerulean" style="display:none;"> # title your awesome markdown content goes here... </xmp> <script src="http://cdn.ztx.io/strapdown/strapdown.min.js"></script> http://cdn.ztx.io/strapdown/strapdown.min.js"></script> </html> ```
    • donatj 4y ago
      Interesting, but I feel like ven this is over built. <script src="imaginary-script"># Hello World
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I hate markdown. Try to find a list of supported syntax highlighting for code blocks.
• fedeb95 4y ago
  The article should probably read: we should write more simple websites. A few lines of css does the trick, usually. That's what I do in my tiny website http://scriptkid.it http://scriptkid.it I learned from someone who posted here on HN the <p> trick.
• rubyist5eva 4y ago
  Screw that I want C++ rendered websites.
• paxys 4y ago
  This misses the real point of Markdown, which isn't to be simple or opinionated but to be readable by the end user in both forms (raw or rendered). In case of a web site there is never the expectation of the source being easy to read for the end user. If you want to create a simple page – great, go for it. The only minor change will be replacing markdown tags with HTML ones. And there's plenty of tooling which does that trivially.
  • XCSme 4y ago
    > of the source being easy to read for the end user But the source is easier to read for you (the author), directly in your code editor or even simply edit the file live on the server via FTP or SSH.
• uses 4y ago
  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.
• JW_00000 4y ago
  What happens currently if you send a file with content type text/plain to a browser? If the browser would just render it (maybe in a monospace font), you're already halfway there, without needing to embed a Markdown renderer in the browser.
• jrm4 4y ago
  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."
  • greenthrow 4y ago
    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.
    • jrm4 4y ago
      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)
      • greenthrow 4y ago
        Now you're moving the goalpost. You originally implied FB making the web easy to write was the major innovation that lead to its success. I pointed out that simply giving people a dirt simple text box had been done many times before. There was nothing special about that part of FB. I am not dumb enough to argue that FB wasn't hugely successful, so your attempt to shift the argument away from your original point is silly.
        • ozim 4y ago
          I have to agree with jrm4 - all the things you pointed out don't explain why FB groups and markets are so popular. There is also bunch of businesses that don't have their own website, just FB page - which is not comparable to "giving people simple text box". It is simplified web experience from point of business owner, just drop logo, type in your company name and you have web presence - which happens to be where people are because they had friends/family there anyway.
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  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.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Agreed. So does John McFarlane, the author of djot (and perhaps more widely known, Pandoc): <https://github.com/jgm/djot 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.
  • chrismorgan 4y ago
    My observation of English-language typewriter and early plain-text computer usage (documents and emails) is that * was mostly used as equivalent to italics, ** and *** for stronger emphasis were not particularly uncommon (bearing in mind that traditionally there was simply no such thing as bold). But _ was kind of a historical oddity, with underlining used in lieu of italics in the typewriter era for technical reasons, implemented by means of overwriting; underscore-surrounding came much later, and never seemed particularly popular to me, and was more often interpreted as underlining rather than as italics—though the typewriter remarks are certainly still relevant, as underlining had for a while changed somewhat in semantics. I say Markdown’s error was doing anything with underscores at all, especially given the programming context and the prevalence of underscores in snake_case and SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE (Python being most heavily affected with its __magic__ methods, so that all implementations will be affected, rather than only some that have gone a certain way on word boundary matching), and it should have just been *italics* and **bold**. Semantically, view italics as emphasis and bold as strong emphasis (basically where HTML 4 headed with <em> and <strong>), and the doubling of the asterisk makes perfect sense. The asterisks are an intensity modifier.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  I've been using Hugo to translate Markdown into my static site, and I've been extremely happy with it.
• Animats 4y ago
  We could just go back to HTML 1.0, which is roughly equivalent to Markdown.
  • Animats 4y ago
    The amusing thing is, that's what his Markdown translator is doing. Look at the page source. There's a fixed CSS preamble, and then there's very basic HTML 1.0: <body> <h1>Why We Should Have Markdown Rendered Websites</h1> <p>You're viewing this document in your HTML-rendering browser but its source is actually a markdown file. </p> ... <pre><code>// file: http://home.md [home](http://home.md) [about](http://about.md) this my homepage // file: http://about.md [home](http://home.md) [about](http://about.md) this my about page </code></pre> ... <p>Best, Tim Daubenschütz <a href="mailto:tim@daubenschuetz.de">tim@daubenschuetz.de</a></p> <h2>References</h2> <ul> <li>1: https://gist.github.com/JoeyBurzynski/617fb6201335779f8424ad9528b72c41</li> </ul> </body> That's it. That's his HTML. You could write that by hand.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• robocat 4y ago
  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.
  • zzo38computer 4y ago
    Which search engines do not execute JavaScript codes?
    • chrismorgan 4y ago
      I last paid active attention to this in mid-2017. At that time, Google mostly, eventually executed JavaScript, but it would often be weeks after initial indexing that any JavaScript execution happened; and there were rumours but scarcely more that Bing could execute JavaScript; and I know of no other engine doing any JavaScript. By mid-2018, Bing definitely sometimes did some JavaScript execution (see https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/bing-javascript/ https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/bing-javascript/). It’s probable things have become a bit more consistent by now, but actually loading pages realistically is so much more expensive than just parsing the initial serialised HTML that I think you can reasonably expect JavaScript-execution to be less consistent and reliable as they will very probably continue to prefer to avoid loading things that way if it’s not obviously required.
• peter_retief 4y ago
  I love using vitepress, https://vitepress.vuejs.org/ https://vitepress.vuejs.org/ Simplification of web development letting the main focus be on content and style.
• ludwigvan 4y ago
  This is a great idea. First browser that implements this natively gets my vote!
• schkolne 4y ago
  This convo reminds me of MDX -- https://mdxjs.com/ https://mdxjs.com/ -- allows you to mix JSX with markdown, popular for making documentation pages for design systems. A lot of the limitations of MD mentioned here are alleviated by allowing arbitrary JSX, which of course is optional for users who want something more basic.
• aliqot 4y ago
  YES THIS IS MY MOMENT!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33505339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33505339
• groffee 4y ago
  I thought the real purpose of markdown was to let your users use HTML on your site but without the security risks of letting them use 'pure' HTML.
  • hinkley 4y ago
    There are some of us that think Markdown should be like this but it isn't. There are implementations in some languages that auto-escape any embedded HTML in a Markdown document, but for others they pass through. That makes Markdown great for content when the authors and system owners are the same people. Not so great for content submissions from anonymous and potentially hostile third parties. The project I originally had in mind for learning Elixir would have been Markdown based but there is no flag for disabling inline HTML in the current parsers and writing my own seemed like a bridge too far.
• robocat 4y ago
  Deliver as markdown, but with a single line header: <!DOCTYPE html><title>Foo</title><script src=mydelayedmarkdownparser.js></script><PLAINTEXT> [[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 </plaintext> end tag, so markdown can be free-form and securely include any unescaped <>”’ characters (raw HTML code) you need into your markdown and the browser will treat it as pure text (unlike the <XMP> tag which can be ended with </XMP> - even weirder lexing). The key is that although the <plaintext> tag is deprecated, every browser has to support it (partially because removing support for <plaintext> would cause security issues for existing pages!) The <plaintext> tag is really very special, quite different from any other tag, and it radically interrupts HTML document lexing/parsing. Use something like https://whatismarkdown.com/how-to-have-markdown-in-realtime-javascript/ https://whatismarkdown.com/how-to-have-markdown-in-realtime-... to read the content of the <plaintext> and dynamically render your markdown into HTML. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/plaintext https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/pl... Edit: and of course there is the HTTP header Content-Type: text/markdown which could be used by browsers to render a markdown document - see “The text/markdown Media Type” RFC https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7763.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7763.html and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Content-Type https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...
  • zzo38computer 4y ago
    What is needing then, is adding the "type" attribute in <plaintext> 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 client implementation does not understand already. The end user can also specify their own overrides, if desired.
    • chrismorgan 4y ago
• indymike 4y ago
  Adding a markdown handler to a web browser should be pretty trivial, and that's probably why it makes little sense to do it.
• RajT88 4y ago
  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.
• colmmacc 4y ago
  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/ http://composedit.net/dickens http://composedit.net/dickens is actually a 404 error that fetches http://composedit.net/text/dickens.md http://composedit.net/text/dickens.md and uses Javascript to render it. Unbelievably dumb but works. Serverless before there was serverless!
• malkosta 4y ago
  One line website renderer with pandoc. Apply template.html to all .md files in current folder. find . -maxdepth 1 -name \*md -exec sh -c 'pandoc --quiet --template template.html "$0" -o ${0%.*}.html' {} \;
• friend_and_foe 4y ago
  There's Gopher, Gemini, a myriad of static site generators that render markdown... I like the idea of my browser rendering markdown. But it's not going to solve the problem, as long as the same client application that renders documents can also render web applications, people looking to bait you with a document into running software on your machine will just publish web applications with some text inside of interest to you. What's needed is separate client software for running web applications and rendering documents, and a different protocol for each, where we fucked up was using http for everything.
  • zzo38computer 4y ago
    While I believe you, and that the currently state is too messy, nevertheless it is possible for some implementations to be more limited or to have options for the user to disable some features if desired. It is true, there are other protocols and other file formats they are good for different purposes, and you should not try to use one for everything. (In my opinion, this is true of Unicode as well; it is messy and doesn't work well to use Unicode for everything, either, nor HTML or HTTPS for everything, or cell phones for everything, or the government for everything, etc.) It would also be possible to serve text/gemini files with HTTP too, and I also have modified my browser to be able to display them (also local files too), this is not common.
  • nonrandomstring 4y ago
    A good summary. People forget what the M in HTML stood for. The slow drift of Hypertext from nice separation of document markup and presentation to "web applications" and browsers that are mini operating systems makes those old jokes about Emacs pale in comparison. The modern bloat-ware browser is a calamity of code, most of which I have no use for and no trust in. So I use a text based browser without JavaScript - and I love it! If I want to run your code on my machine I'll install a proper application that has at least been through some basic code signing, packaging and secure distribution channels. Gemini seems like one of the few hopes for breaking away from the madness of "Web" and restoring some sort of sane, plain document publishing for ordinary people to read and share information.
• synergy20 4y ago
  Or browser just renders markdown directly.
• PedroBatista 4y ago
  We already have HTML What we have done to it it's a different matter. Btw, which flavor of Markdown? "and if I want to do..?"™ Don't we'll end up with an HTML without angle brackets?
• littlecranky67 4y ago
  I had similar idea and created MDwiki in 2013 (now unmaintained): https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md
• steve_john 4y ago
• zzo38computer 4y ago
  I get a 429 error.
• lolive 4y ago
  Me buying the domain name react-markdown.com and the github repo "react-markdown" ... PROFIT !!!
  • lolive 4y ago
    Damn! Already too late !
• karaterobot 4y ago
  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.
• bonestamp2 4y ago
  Something pretty similar already exists, and it's free... Github pages can turn your markdown into a website, hosted for free: https://www.markdownguide.org/tools/github-pages/ https://www.markdownguide.org/tools/github-pages/
• fleddr 4y ago
  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.
  • VancouverMan 4y ago
    Aside from perhaps images, I wish that browsers didn't try to render more complex content. I'd much rather be able to easily watch YouTube and embedded videos, for example, in an external player. And I've almost always ended up reopening PDFs in an external viewer, or configured the browser to do that by default where that option exists. Maybe Markdown isn't as much of an issue as the videos and PDFs are, but it seems to me like it's better handled externally from the browser, or perhaps by an optional browser extension.
• armchairhacker 4y ago
  We should have multiple formats besides HTML. In fact we already do have this, in the “Content-Type” response header, we just should use it more Send data with Content-Type text/json and Firefox will display a fancy JSON viewer, send data with text/plain and Firefox displays plain text, pdf files, downloadable files, etc. Well, we can add text/markdown where the browser automatically renders markdown files. And when the next HTML replacement comes out we can add that as well. What about backwards compatibility? We already have that too: webservers can check the User-Agent request header, and return converted data for older browsers. Though we’d need a centralized database or fallback solution to support niche browsers…
• tomp 4y ago
  The author is lying. The source isn't actually a markdown document, the source is HTML (you can easily verify this by right-clicking and selecting "View Source") It's actually quite easy to actually render markdown pages in a browser. Start with this: <!doctype html><meta charset="utf-8"><script src="notes-all.js"></script><textarea> ## MarkDown *HERE*!!!!! and "notes-all.js" contains something like this: document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css">')); document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', (event) => { var m = markdownIt({'html': true, 'linkify': true}); var t = document.querySelector('textarea'); var d = document.createElement('div'); d.setAttribute('id', 'content'); d.innerHTML = m.render(t.value); t.replaceWith(d); }); followed by markdown-it source code
  • harryvederci 4y ago
    I think the author means that they wrote a markdown document, which then was transformed (by a CI/CD pipeline, for example) to the html you see when you inspect the source. I like your "Serve markdown, transform through a client-side script" approach though, so upvoting nonetheless.
• tinyspacewizard 4y ago
  I would like Markdown encoded as s-expressions... but watchagonnado
• hit8run 4y ago
  Why not simply use text/plain content type when going fully minimal?
• frankus 4y ago
  One thing that's always been a source of a tension for me is how to handle navigating around a "web of documents". There are limits to what you can do with "in-band" links in the text before they get to be contrived, awkward, and non-discoverable. Users seem to have a revealed preference for on-page links to barely-related URLs and want those links to have some spatial consistency over time. So that means adding some "fluff" (nowadays presumably nested in a <navigation> tag) to every document. One past experiment with out-of-band navigation was framesets, but they had some significant issues (not least of which is that the URL pointed to a container rather than the contained document). Are there some other interesting experiments with out-of-band navigation? Or is adding some semantic tags to HTML as good as it gets?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• err4nt 4y ago
  With modern HTML it's actually pretty easy to use markdown wherever you like. Though there is no built-in markdown element, they have built in the ability for authors to define custom elements. You can define your own custom <mark-down> element and put your mark down syntax inside and as it is, as source code it's nice and human readable even if we didn't do anything further. But we can also define how this element should render, and so it's very straightforward work to wire up any existing "markdown to HTML" library in JavaScript to consume the markdown contents of the tag and display rendered HTML. This is so easy to do, not just for markdown, but almost anything you could want to embed or work with in HTML.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• kderbyma 4y ago
  My personal website is done similarly. I built it on top of markdown and added my own shortcodes so I could add macros and custom plugins as I added. The site code lives separate from the post, media, and general 'content' and doesn't care what content is provided.
• innocentoldguy 4y ago
  I like Markdown and use it at work, but I think Asciidoc is a better markup language because it is more consistent and has support for more things than Markdown does (e.g., better table support, callouts, tips, etc.). I currently use 11ty with the Asciidoc plugin for building websites. This setup is nice because I only have to fiddle with HTML and CSS during the design phase. Once that's done, nearly all my website maintenance is done in Asciidoc. Easy! I don't think I'd want to directly write an entire website in either Markdown or Asciidoc. I think, eventually, doing so would result in these markup languages becoming as cluttered and weird as the HTML/DOM/JavaScript/CSS mess is now. I think a better step to improving HTML and CSS would be to have the browsers support Slim (https://github.com/deepin-community/ruby-slim https://github.com/deepin-community/ruby-slim) and Sass out of the box instead. That would make my design phase less wordy and redundant while keeping my Asciidoc experience nice and tidy.
• yoro46 4y ago
  I've been debating on using Org Mode documents to render to HTML and serve those kind of static pages for a blog. I've heard of people doing something similar before (Org -> HTML or Org -> Md -> HTML). But the other part of me wants my own NIHed, over-engineered solution :)
• russellbeattie 4y ago
  OMG, no. We need to bring text editing into the 21st century where rich text is standardized across all platforms and devices. We can send multicolored emoji to just about any device on the planet, but we still can't bold, italicize, underline or color basic text. It's straight up insane. Think about it: There is no such thing as "plain text", it's just encoding we don't see. Even if you're a die-hard keyboard jockey, unless you're looking at your command line and mentally parsing raw ANSI encoding like \e[1mBold, you're not using "plain text". There's tons of encoding underneath every text editor and terminal program, you just don't see it. We already have a standard encoding for rich-text, we need to start using it. It's called HTML, and every device with a screen on the planet knows how to display it. We just need to hide the tags everyone bitches about just like vi hides a highlighted line's \e[43mYellow codes. We should never need to see it. Any place we're able to enter text should support rich text, from boot up screen through to apps. And underneath it should all be HTML. It's like the display compositor on macOS. None of us think about the fact it uses PDF under the hood, right? We're not debating whether it should be done using SVG. It's invisible. This debate should have been settled decades ago. I've been writing about this in detail for the past several weeks. I swear the tech industry has lost its collective minds. At this point I'm truly wondering if Markdown is some sort of cult. We need to kill these lightweight markup formats with extreme prejudice and start solving the real problem.
• preseinger 4y ago
  Thus, instead of - Fruits - apple - orange you must write - Fruits - apple - orange This is an obvious non-starter. (edit) ...we allow headings to "lazily" span multiple lines: > ## My excessively long section heading is too > long to fit on one line. What? ...if you open a code span and don't close it, it extends to the end of the paragraph. That is similar to the way fenced code blocks work in commonmark. > This is `inline code. Is this a joke?
• Popeyes 4y ago
  What we (I) need is a simple product flow from Word (the corporate writer of choice) to HTML (the lingo of the web). I thought Markdown might get into Word somehow as an export option (without plugins) but sadly not.
• syrrim 4y ago
  My personal take is that markdown is only good when you can customize it to your needs and situation. There are a million markdown flavours, because everyone who ever implements it decides to add their own extensions to it to suit their situation. There have been attempts at creating a single unified standard, but these miss the point: if we wanted a single shared syntax, we could use html directly; the advantage of markdown(s) is that it lets you create something that looks clean and simple as plain text, while turning into a nicely marked-up document. A "standard" markdown would need to have a "standard" extension mecahnism (or none at all...) which would inevitably look like ass for most use cases. I nowadays usually just write html directly for my personal documents, because I spent long enough messing around with markdown parsers trying to get them to act how I want. But for a website commenting system (eg), it makes sense to spend some time making the formatting system nice to use, which involves customizing your flavour of markdown. I don't think web browsers can or should try to do a good job of this; it requires to many specialized demands for them to be able to create a generic solution. If you want to write in markdown, its easy enough nowadays to format it on the server, or client side with a small js snippet.
• arnaudsm 4y ago
  I built an ultralight markdown CMS with this philosophy in mind : https://github.com/arnaudsm/raito https://github.com/arnaudsm/raito Just drop index.html on a static server, and it's live.
• chatterhead 4y ago
  Wasn't this the whole point of the XHTML push back in like 2009?
• the_af 4y ago
  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 actively opposed the mere notion. Gruber claimed ambiguity was baked in in markdown and he didn't want a standard. So take this into consideration before proposing some markdown standards committee: the creator of markdown has said he actively opposes this. I guess he can be bypassed, but what does it say about the future of said standard if the original author says "no"?
  • _ZeD_ 4y ago
    I'll just ignore Gruber... his sloppyness in defining the details created a myriad of dialects of markdown
    • the_af 4y ago
      I agree with you! My point is that Gruber claims the sloppiness is intentional and actively resists fixing it. And if he -- the creator -- is not on board with standardizing markdown, maybe the whole endeavor is a dead end? I mean, it could be done even against his wishes, but the project would already be starting with a big negative.
• breck 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm biased as I created Scroll, but I can say pretty objectively that at this point it's far better than Markdown and the gap is only going to widen. Try it out! https://scroll.pub/ https://scroll.pub/
• mrtweetyhack 4y ago
• bradgessler 4y ago
  The problem with only using markup to render websites is the lack of navigation. We need something to show next/previous page (we have rel headers and tags for that) and something that shows a tree navigation structure for populating menus (not sure what exists for that) The tree structure would need to be “crawlable” because for very large sites, the entire tree can’t be loaded. That could be solved by representing nodes on the tree as URLs that can be loaded by the client as needed. I’d love to see this happen. I don’t think we need markdown per-se… maybe it’s a subset of HTML that leaves out css, JavaScript, and a lot of the other nonsense. Is anybody interested in building this out? I have ideas for the server and formats, but would want help implementing the clients.
• tapirl 4y ago
  Feasible only if md is a totally specified format.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  The charm of markdown is there are different flavours, you pick your favourite, and it can evolve independently of the web itself. Making browsers render markdown means markdown needs a single standard, or a standard of specifying standards and some kind of document type declaration, agreement by WHATWG and so on! For what? There are a lot of web publishing platforms for non technical authors. Free and paid. There are also simple programs to turn markdown into HTML. Uploading, hosting, DNS are much bigger barriers than HTML syntax anyway.
• somat 4y ago
  I agree that we should have some diversity in our rich text terminal systems, however I think that markdown is significantly close to the tree(html) that it does not matter much, my candidate is postscript. this is only half a joke, What I would really like to see is diversity in our client side scripting system. The elevator proposal goes something like this. restructure the browser to expose a virtual machine, then let us do things like (script lang="https://gcc.org/gcc8")...(/script) https://gcc.org/gcc8")...(/script) or (script lang="https://rust-lang.org/165/wvm https://rust-lang.org/165/wvm") or lang="https://python.org/11/wvm https://python.org/11/wvm", etc, etc. The way we are stuck on javascript is kind of sad.
• mehdi_guiraud 4y ago
  Actually, there's an app that does that : Joplin from https://github.com/laurent22/joplin https://github.com/laurent22/joplin you can publicise the markdown text that you're writing in markdown. here's an example with my joplin server and with the desktop app running on linux. I get this link : https://joplin.mehdiguiraud.info/shares/8YBjIJwoNh15uVY900xqlR https://joplin.mehdiguiraud.info/shares/8YBjIJwoNh15uVY900xq...
• lakomen 4y ago
  No we shouldn't. Markdown is just a small representation of markup that gets transformed to HTML.
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  No, why should we do that? Markdown websites just to render it BACK into HTML? That's not the browser's job. The issue is, Markdown is nice because of its simplicity. The minute you start making it standard and widespread... feature-creep will happen and MD will just have as much noise as HTML does now.
• b1nj0y 4y ago
  I don't think markdown is simple for those don't know any tech. Those who can write markdown can set up Hugo, Jekyll, Hexo well.
• b1nj0y 4y ago
  I've create a Hugo blog Template used to create a Hugo blog quickly: https://github.com/openpress/easy-hugo-blog https://github.com/openpress/easy-hugo-blog
• gorbypark 4y ago
  Once upon a time I made a very minimal PoC markdown "browser" in a day or two. It basically had a navigation bar like a browser, only displayed markdown and would only follow links to other markdown documents. It was more of a project to play with React Native for macOS/Windows more than anything serious, but I think the general idea could be neat if implemented correctly in some native GUI toolkits.
• dtagames 4y ago
  Markdown by definition compiles to HTML and must be rendered by a browser as HTML. This seems to be a widely overlooked fact in this thread. It's fine to write MD, but know that it's a limited and shortcut form for the real HTML that will be output and rendered. The short form is great for short stuff but to access the full power of HTML and CSS takes really messy spaghetti MD. And don't even start with JS or TS. Modern sites usually need code and that means web components and that means real HTML and all of CSS need to be present and accessible in an orthogonal way -- not some via MD syntax and some with HTML glommed-onto MD.
• martyalain 4y ago
  It's said that the father of LISP, John McCarthy, lamented the W3C's choice of SGML as the basis for HTML : « An environment where the markup, styling and scripting is all s-expression based would be nice. » The {lambda way} project could be an answer, small and simple: http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ In lambdatalk such a HTML code <h1>Page Title</h1> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum. <p>Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam. Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales. is written like this _h1 Page Title _p Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum. _p Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam. Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales. And you can also compute 3x4 writing {x 3 4} or compute the factorial of 100, compute a Fast Fourier Transform, draw complex graphics, ... it's a true programming language with a coherent syntax, unlike Markdown.
• kelsolaar 4y ago
  Mandatory mention to Markdeep: https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/
• suprjami 4y ago
  Jekyll on GitHub Pages does exactly this. I wrote a dynamic PHP markdown site thing years ago which I still use at work to host Markdown files: https://github.com/superjamie/emdee https://github.com/superjamie/emdee
• nipperkinfeet 4y ago
  Docsify already does this.
• lobocinza 4y ago
  > "towards a presentation-independent data format for text" Wikitext is more suitable than Markdown for this role though less ergonomic. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikitext https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikitext
• XCSme 4y ago
  I also ended up using Markdown to create a blogging platform[0] for my website. It has many benefits as it's a popular format, so you can for example edit and see the result directly inside VSCode. [0]: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog
• gw67 4y ago
  I wonder why nobody has created a netflix based on Torrent search.