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Something I’d like to see in browsers is native support for text/markdown and text/gemini. If browsers can decide to render PDFs, surely a simple formatter and

Something I’d like to see in browsers is native support for text/markdown and text/gemini. If browsers can decide to render PDFs, surely a simple formatter and user-decidable stylesheets for markdown/gemini content can’t be that hard to ship. As it stands you can write a text/plain blog but you will be hurt with SEO concerns since it isn’t really hypertext (maybe you could do some magic with link headers). Supporting other formats lowers the barrier to publishing in a neat manner and gives control back to users.

Lord_Zero 1y ago
Gemini has its own format?
- tweetle_beetle 1y ago
  > It has some superficial resemblances to Markdown, which will make it easy to learn if you know MD, but it's quite different in other ways. https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi
quectophoton 1y ago
> Something I’d like to see in browsers is native support for text/markdown [...] Sadly, I can see why it's unlikely that we'd get this. First, browsers would need to agree on which flavor of Markdown, what extensions, and so on. After all, Markdown is almost like the CSV of text formats, with everyone doing their own thing ("almost" because you can still assume that some basic things work as you'd expect). Only with that, I can already see the backlash no matter what they choose to do here. Too minimal, and get complains about not being too useful. Choose some extensions, get complains about being bloated. Make any attempt to have a thoughtful discussion about pros and cons (short and long term), get shut down with "don't let perfect be the enemy of good". If we can get past that and finally agree on one specific set of features, there's still the question of whether it's actually worth it or not. The difference between Markdown and PDF is that reading PDFs directly in the browser is a common enough activity, but reading Markdown directly is only going to benefit the tiny audience of the small percentage of software devs that exist in the world, and maybe 5 weird people. Everyone else with a blog would just use the WYSIWYG from their CMS. That's why I wouldn't be surprised if I don't see native Markdown rendering during my lifetime.
- yellowapple 1y ago
  > First, browsers would need to agree on which flavor of Markdown, what extensions, and so on. The correct answer is CommonMark. At that point extensions don't matter, since there's a common enough base that a Markdown document written with unsupported extensions in mind will still look decent. Reference code is abundant and permissively licensed. There's no good reason to pick any other flavor (and most other flavors are compatible enough with CommonMark for it to be a non-issue anyway).
fc417fc802 1y ago
> If browsers can decide to render PDFs They do that with JS (or at least they did at one point). Similar libraries exist for XSLT if you want newer versions than what browsers natively support, for jpegxl, and many other formats.

Lord_Zero 1y ago

Gemini has its own format?

tweetle_beetle 1y ago
> It has some superficial resemblances to Markdown, which will make it easy to learn if you know MD, but it's quite different in other ways. https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/gemtext.gmi

quectophoton 1y ago

> Something I’d like to see in browsers is native support for text/markdown [...] Sadly, I can see why it's unlikely that we'd get this. First, browsers would need to agree on which flavor of Markdown, what extensions, and so on. After all, Markdown is almost like the CSV of text formats, with everyone doing their own thing ("almost" because you can still assume that some basic things work as you'd expect). Only with that, I can already see the backlash no matter what they choose to do here. Too minimal, and get complains about not being too useful. Choose some extensions, get complains about being bloated. Make any attempt to have a thoughtful discussion about pros and cons (short and long term), get shut down with "don't let perfect be the enemy of good". If we can get past that and finally agree on one specific set of features, there's still the question of whether it's actually worth it or not. The difference between Markdown and PDF is that reading PDFs directly in the browser is a common enough activity, but reading Markdown directly is only going to benefit the tiny audience of the small percentage of software devs that exist in the world, and maybe 5 weird people. Everyone else with a blog would just use the WYSIWYG from their CMS. That's why I wouldn't be surprised if I don't see native Markdown rendering during my lifetime.

yellowapple 1y ago
> First, browsers would need to agree on which flavor of Markdown, what extensions, and so on. The correct answer is CommonMark. At that point extensions don't matter, since there's a common enough base that a Markdown document written with unsupported extensions in mind will still look decent. Reference code is abundant and permissively licensed. There's no good reason to pick any other flavor (and most other flavors are compatible enough with CommonMark for it to be a non-issue anyway).

fc417fc802 1y ago

> If browsers can decide to render PDFs They do that with JS (or at least they did at one point). Similar libraries exist for XSLT if you want newer versions than what browsers natively support, for jpegxl, and many other formats.