https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/why-is-markdown-popular.html https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/why-is-markdown-p... > Why don’t we have an

https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/why-is-markdown-popular.html https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/why-is-markdown-p... > Why don’t we have an HTML-based rich text standard yet? > I have zero idea. In fact, we seem to be getting farther away from one as Markdown popularity surges. > The other day I read a blog post by the folks at Mozilla - who are supposed to be the standard bearers of, um, web standards, and was truly shocked that they decided to convert all their documentation to Markdown last year. What?? In fact, they stopped using HTML in order to do it. Yep, I am baffled by this too. Glad to see that I am not the only one ! I am aware of at least one document editor project that at least tries to have a working round trip conversion to HTML : https://texmacs.org/tmweb/help/faq.en.html https://texmacs.org/tmweb/help/faq.en.html (But I am afraid that it will never work as well as an editor that treats HTML as the first class document type...) https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/the-decades-long-html-bundle-quagmire.html https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/the-decades-long-... > But most importantly, since my goal was to replace Markdown as a simple, easily manageable rich text document format, trying to also tackle the bundling issue was besides the point. Markdown doesn't include files, doesn't care about them and will never have them. There's no reason for an HTML Document standard to deal with encapsulated files either, as essential as it might first seem. > All that said, I'm sure someone, somewhere might wonder why my Hypertext editor doesn't have some sort of option to save as a zipped file format of some sort, I thought I'd share what I discovered reading up on the topic. Then maybe someone can get the W3C, Mozilla, Google and Apple to finally make up their minds and decide on a standard that we can use in the future. (I won't hold my breath. Yeah, sigh... Still, bundling is kind of essential - most documents will want to have at least some multimedia, and you generally do NOT want to have them get split into multiple files ! As you say I still don't understand why Firefox, instead of a separate folder for the non-HTML content, does not "throw a bunch of files into a zip and call it a day?", especially when ePub does that already !