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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

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
- cxr 4y ago
  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.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Presumably if you want to "distribute digital artifacts in the format that is most useful for editing or creating derivative works", like parent said, you would make it look good.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      That means you distribute the best you have. It doesn't obligate you to use better methods.
      - ElevenLathe 4y ago
        Exactly this. I was paraphrasing the definition of source code from the GPL: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
    - cxr 4y ago
      This isn't an unknowable hypothetical. No need to presume anything. Markdown found in the wild is a mess. The GitHub Flavored Markdown renderer even encourages it.
- jmull 4y ago
  This is a really good point. (I should have/wish I had brought it up in my original post!
krono 4y ago
Sourcemaps for HTML essentially.
gambler 4y ago
>Many of us learned HTML and web technologies by reading the source code of websites HTML is an extensible language. Markdown is not.
saurik 4y ago
This is actually horrible for society as it implies that the Web Browser will have to implement a billion different parsers for all of the separate file formats it supports, which not only causes it to have a ridiculously large attack surface but pretty much implies there will only be a couple serious separate implementations (if even that soon...) as it is just too difficult for even a large company now to build a browser. Meanwhile, it doesn't even ensure the property of being able to view source, as people can and do obfuscate things they don't want you to see, and if people want you to see the source code there is nothing preventing them from making that entirely pipeline visible, including, but certainly not limited to, shipping a trivial markdown parser to the browser instead of doing the conversion on a server. In a perfect world, the browser should have simply provided something like canvas hooked up to something like WebAssembly, and we should have provided for everyone a trivial markup file format rendered that people could include by default and a handful of graphic file format implementations that could be easily mix-and-matched to pull just the ones people wanted into their site.

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

cxr 4y ago
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.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Presumably if you want to "distribute digital artifacts in the format that is most useful for editing or creating derivative works", like parent said, you would make it look good.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    That means you distribute the best you have. It doesn't obligate you to use better methods.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      Exactly this. I was paraphrasing the definition of source code from the GPL: "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
  - cxr 4y ago
    This isn't an unknowable hypothetical. No need to presume anything. Markdown found in the wild is a mess. The GitHub Flavored Markdown renderer even encourages it.
jmull 4y ago
This is a really good point. (I should have/wish I had brought it up in my original post!

krono 4y ago

Sourcemaps for HTML essentially.

gambler 4y ago

>Many of us learned HTML and web technologies by reading the source code of websites HTML is an extensible language. Markdown is not.

saurik 4y ago

This is actually horrible for society as it implies that the Web Browser will have to implement a billion different parsers for all of the separate file formats it supports, which not only causes it to have a ridiculously large attack surface but pretty much implies there will only be a couple serious separate implementations (if even that soon...) as it is just too difficult for even a large company now to build a browser. Meanwhile, it doesn't even ensure the property of being able to view source, as people can and do obfuscate things they don't want you to see, and if people want you to see the source code there is nothing preventing them from making that entirely pipeline visible, including, but certainly not limited to, shipping a trivial markdown parser to the browser instead of doing the conversion on a server. In a perfect world, the browser should have simply provided something like canvas hooked up to something like WebAssembly, and we should have provided for everyone a trivial markup file format rendered that people could include by default and a handful of graphic file format implementations that could be easily mix-and-matched to pull just the ones people wanted into their site.