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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 postproce

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.

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.