4 ms·

Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can

Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. The web is full of great content being made hard to access because of poor/inflexible layout choices. Just give me the text and let me choose how to make it readable. The added fact that you can read raw markdown without even parsing it makes it even better. Not having total control over what its going to look like for the reader is a feature not a bug.

zimpenfish 6mo ago
> Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. God, remember when that was that goal of HTML and the web? What a beautiful couple of years that was.
- singpolyma3 6mo ago
  IMHO still is. Just don't add any JS or CSS
  - grumbel 6mo ago
    Problem with that is that the default browser styling is extremely ugly and the ability for custom style sheets was removed from the browser GUI many years ago. ReaderMode and Addons can help, but as long as the default is essentially broken and unsupported that whole approach remains a dead end. On top of that come issues like the lack of pagination support in browsers, which make long document impossible to read and practically require to add custom UI inside the website itself. ePub works much better, with readers giving control over line spacing, font size, pagination and proper markup for TOC and other metadata, but despite ePub being based on xHTML, browsers have ignored it (only old Edge supported it for a little while).
- Tadpole9181 6mo ago
  No? That has always been a uniquely unreadable language with weird, arbitrary choices. And on no planet is it human readable without parsing.
  - krapp 6mo ago
    On this planet, humans have read HTML without parsing for years. People building their first websites without any significant technical knowledge stole HTML by reading the source of other sites and edited it by hand.
    - Tadpole9181 6mo ago
      Oh, please. Don't insult everyone here by pretending you actually believe HTML is a human readable format like markdown. It was never designed for that and has never claimed that. What a rediculous thing to even say.
      - krapp 6mo ago
        It is. Humans do read it, and have read it. Like any language it's just a matter of familiarity. HTML was designed for humans to read and write long before Claude or compiling everything from typescript or whatever, when websites were all written by hand. In text editors. Even if you were using PHP and templates or CGI you wrote that shit by hand, which meant you had to be able to read it and understand it. Even if you were using Dreamweaver, you had to know how to read and write HTML at some point. WYSIWYG only gets you so far. Is HTML more difficult to read than Markdown? Sure. It is impossible? Not even remotely. Teenagers did it putting together their Geocities websites. You can be as snarky as you like, but facts are facts.
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      - ang_cire 6mo ago
        I'm confused. Are you saying you cannot read an HTML file?
xigoi 6mo ago
> Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. You know, like when you write <h2> in HTML or \section{} in LaTeX?

zimpenfish 6mo ago

> Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. God, remember when that was that goal of HTML and the web? What a beautiful couple of years that was.

singpolyma3 6mo ago
IMHO still is. Just don't add any JS or CSS
- grumbel 6mo ago
  Problem with that is that the default browser styling is extremely ugly and the ability for custom style sheets was removed from the browser GUI many years ago. ReaderMode and Addons can help, but as long as the default is essentially broken and unsupported that whole approach remains a dead end. On top of that come issues like the lack of pagination support in browsers, which make long document impossible to read and practically require to add custom UI inside the website itself. ePub works much better, with readers giving control over line spacing, font size, pagination and proper markup for TOC and other metadata, but despite ePub being based on xHTML, browsers have ignored it (only old Edge supported it for a little while).
Tadpole9181 6mo ago
No? That has always been a uniquely unreadable language with weird, arbitrary choices. And on no planet is it human readable without parsing.
- krapp 6mo ago
  On this planet, humans have read HTML without parsing for years. People building their first websites without any significant technical knowledge stole HTML by reading the source of other sites and edited it by hand.
  - Tadpole9181 6mo ago
    Oh, please. Don't insult everyone here by pretending you actually believe HTML is a human readable format like markdown. It was never designed for that and has never claimed that. What a rediculous thing to even say.
    - krapp 6mo ago
      It is. Humans do read it, and have read it. Like any language it's just a matter of familiarity. HTML was designed for humans to read and write long before Claude or compiling everything from typescript or whatever, when websites were all written by hand. In text editors. Even if you were using PHP and templates or CGI you wrote that shit by hand, which meant you had to be able to read it and understand it. Even if you were using Dreamweaver, you had to know how to read and write HTML at some point. WYSIWYG only gets you so far. Is HTML more difficult to read than Markdown? Sure. It is impossible? Not even remotely. Teenagers did it putting together their Geocities websites. You can be as snarky as you like, but facts are facts.
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
    - ang_cire 6mo ago
      I'm confused. Are you saying you cannot read an HTML file?

xigoi 6mo ago

> Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. You know, like when you write <h2> in HTML or \section{} in LaTeX?