We should have Markdown-rendered websites

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafybeid7lt7snuzcvcmfqs5a5hlc5fmk3xmflz4hx2qa7c674vm3rpsdvm/why-we-should-have-markdown-rendered-websites.html

by timdaub • 4 years ago

325 333 4 years ago

ipfs.io

sgbeal2• 4 years ago

FWIW, just a couple of weeks ago we started doing that for a new sqlite subproject: https://sqlite.org/wasm

With the exception of one page, all of them are markdown, rendered on demand by the Fossil SCM. The one exception is an HTML file, which we need in order to host a small JS application.

another_story2• 4 years ago

When you say rendered on demand, you mean by the client, as in a page request? Why not just rerender to HTML on developer change? Genuinely curious why rendering on demand is preferred in this case.

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

Maybe they cache the rendered version? This would keep rendering to a minimum

sgbeal2• 4 years ago

... as in a page request?

Yup.

Why not just rerender to HTML on developer change?

Because that's not how the Fossil SCM renders content. It has a cache, but only for certain high-CPU data like generation of zip files of the source tree. Caching markdown docs wouldn't work in all cases, anyway: when you link to a ticket, for example, it gets rendered differently depending on whether it's opened or closed. Thus the renderer has to know the current status of any fossil-internal constructs a doc links to. Of course, we could say "just update the cache of all docs which link to a ticket every time the ticket is updated," but That Way Lies Madness. In an Enterprise-level system that would possibly be worth doing. For the Fossil SCM it's overkill.

Though re-rendering on every page hit _sounds_ bad, we've been doing it in the Fossil SCM since it went into being and it has never caused us any undue performance issues. Every doc you see on <https://fossil-scm.org/home>, as opposed to the non-doc URIs, is served directly from the SCM db and all (or very close to all) of it is either markdown or Fossil's older/original wiki format, both rendered on demand. CPU load is minimal and rendering is "fast enough" for everything we've ever done with it.

timdaub8• 4 years ago

If you're interested in the history of why I wrote this article, then it originated from this Twitter thread: https://nitter.net/timdaub/status/1590731949433573377

nelsondev• 4 years ago

I think addressing the concern around Markdown flavors would improve the argument.

timdaub8• 4 years ago

ok thanks I'll inform myself and think about this a bit more. I wasn't aware flavors would lead to controversy but it makes sense.

danielvaughn• 4 years ago

There’s prose.io which basically does this

http://prose.io/

satvikpendem2• 4 years ago

See also https://prose.sh (I guess `prose` is a popular name in this space) and https://bearblog.dev.

falcolas2• 4 years ago

OK. Which flavor of markdown should we get every browser manufacturer to use?

djbusby• 4 years ago

Asciidoc.

GartzenDeHaes• 4 years ago

AsciiDoc is a plain text markup language for writing technical content. It’s packed with semantic elements and equipped with features to modularize and reuse content.

Isn't that the opposite of Markdown?

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

I made a comment about how to do this as my very first HN post on this account[1] in a code-golf-y sort of thread:

Here's the example:

    # Markdown header

    ## Subheader

    ### Section header

    1. Numbered
    1. List

    - Unordered
    - List


    [//]: # (<html><body></body><script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/marked/marked.min.js"></script><script>var doc = document.children[0].textContent.split('\n'); md = doc.slice(0, doc.length - 1).join("\n"); document.body.innerHTML = marked(md);</script></html><!--)

Now, whether this is wise to encourage or not I can't speak to.

It would be great if browsers parsed markdown as text-only

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25352385#25355751

piskerpan• 4 years ago

Nice! You don't need the HTML and BODY tags though.

I think however this defeats the purpose: yes you're delivering the content as Markdown, but you have to deliver it as `text/html` for it to be rendered, so anyone fetching it can't tell it's Markdown content. Also every document has to have (invisible-ish) HTML junk appended

A "better" solution would be a browser that sends the `Accept: text/markdown, text/html` header and a server that serves Markdown only when requested.

lake_vincent• 4 years ago

Let's just embrace the chaos and develop a new flavor for every browser until there are precisely 31 different flavors of Markdown. We cap it there, Baskin Robbins style, and then watch the world burn.

thih93• 4 years ago

We could have a higher level language and tooling that transpiles everything to all known markdown flavors and bundles them all. But I guess one of these 31 flavors already does that.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

myst

reichardt• 4 years ago

HTML

Ideabile• 4 years ago

This is the reason why Markdown isn't a good specification for this. But I do agree with the sentiment.

ohgodplsno• 4 years ago

Make a World Wide Markdown Consortium, release v1 of Markdown based on a randomly picked flavor, let it stagnate for decades, then let Google implement shadowMarkdown in Google Chrome, which renders at 300FPS for them, and unluckily falls back to a JS polyfill that ends up solving a rubik's cube before every character it renders. Once that has gone for long enough, let Google form their own MHATWG and pretend it's open while they keep a majority of the seats, to steer the evolution of WebMarkdown.

Also Safari still doesn't support headings for some reason.

falcolas2• 4 years ago

My personal preference would be GitHub flavored markdown, since as a coder it includes a lot of very useful non-standard markups. The compromises it makes on the non-deterministic markup elements are acceptable as well.

acomjean2• 4 years ago

I think this makes sense.

Many of the GitHub readmes are in markdown already, so people are quite familiar with it and there might already be an open source package that renders it out…

toastal4• 4 years ago

Like how they're introducing admonitions syntax by overloading the blockquote sigil that makes it difficult or impossible to nest, has a heavy English bias, and doesn't even transform the underlying element making the use of blockquote unsemantic. They also just skipped the CommonMark RFC and other implementations throwing their weight into the ring with no regard for prior art. I also don't think a corporation, Microsoft, needs to be in charge of the spec either. No thank you.

jerf4• 4 years ago

CommonMark seems like the obvious choice: https://commonmark.org/

It isn't as supported as I'd like, but it does exist and I've encountered it "in the wild" a few times, so it's not just some guy typing away on a website either.

bachmeier2• 4 years ago

After all these years, I still haven't found an important argument in favor of CommonMark. As I point out every time someone presents it as the answer, it doesn't handle things like math, so you still need to use unstandardized extensions, making the whole thing pointless.

miroljub• 4 years ago

Why not use org-mode format, which is a much saner markup language?

Being there, why not just implement full org-mode in browsers natively, and use it instead of html?

euroderf• 4 years ago

Many Markdown dialects are adopting YAML metadata, so why not start a file with (for example)

  ---
  Dialect: GFM
  ---

rcarmo3• 4 years ago

That's what I do at taoofmac.com internally. The whole thing is a mix of Textile, Markdown and HTML

toastal4• 4 years ago

All dialects of Org Mode, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, HTML files, ODF files, EXIF data on images support metadata in file--it's the norm. The fact that Markdown's spec doesn't support metadata by default and most "dialects" don't this ad hoc syntax (YAML of all broken things) shows that Markdown not suitable for most kinds of documents.

therobot24• 4 years ago

isn't this why HTML was invented?

agree that it'd be nice to have a markdown file be rendered inherently within the browser so i don't have to use haroopad on my windows machine, but it feels like we're just going to reinvent HTML

jrochkind13• 4 years ago

Agreed, original HTML was not too different than markdown really. (But more standard, and slightly more powerful with things like tables, code blocks, and definition lists, all of which are only non-standard extensions to markdown!)

Maybe what OP really wants is a lot more people to write HTML without _any_ CSS or Javascript. But that's already more or less available, so there are reasons people don't do it to grapple with.

Perhaps a mode where you tell the browser to ignore any CSS or Javascript; possibly also in this mode the browser could use better more readable standard html rendering, similar to what most markdown renderers choose by default (bigger font sizes and line-height, more and more even whitspace around headings, maximum page width, etc), instead of the legacy choices they are now sticking with for backwards compat.

xigoi5• 4 years ago

Perhaps a mode where you tell the browser to ignore any CSS or Javascript; possibly also in this mode the browser could use better more readable standard html rendering, similar to what most markdown renderers choose by default (bigger font sizes and line-height, more and more even whitspace around headings, maximum page width, etc), instead of the legacy choices they are now sticking with for backwards compat.

Isn't that just Reader Mode?

dgan• 4 years ago

why not OrgMode websites? it handles tables too!

satvikpendem2• 4 years ago

Recently there was a thread about GitHub Blocks, interactive elements within READMEs and Markdown files in general. If we could standardize that and support it, that would be cool.

Also, isn't this basically what HTML does anyway?

toastal4• 4 years ago

You mean stuff that is already standardized and in Asciidoctor? That would be easier than trying to wrangle in all of these forks/flavors with all their incompatible extensions and tools all while have no way to handle metadata?

dreadlordbone• 4 years ago

I would love to use more markdown but I need multidimensional layouts decided by the author (variable columns with text and images) and I haven't seen anything like this.

PainfullyNormal• 4 years ago

It's been 10 years since Zed Shaw suggested a <markdown/> tag.

clean speech warning: swearing. https://youtu.be/_CEBG_s92P8?t=398

sxp• 4 years ago

Part of the benefit of Markdown is that you can view the raw source and still get useful info out of it. But this site prerendered the Markdown and served HTML which defeats part of the purpose.

A better option would be to use something like https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ and serve the MD/HTML file. Then you can get a client-rendered HTML (https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html) or view the raw MD (https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html?noforma...) if the browser doesn't support HTML.

Markdeep is good at progressively mixing HTML & MD so you can choose how much of each to put in to your page. I use it for mostly MD + MathJax notes + some HTML/JS/SVG/Canvas/WebGL for when I want dynamic graphics in my notes.

mutant• 4 years ago

These websites didn't render for shit on my mobile. I had to zoom in and out.

I'd never subject a reader to this kind of horrible UI.

graypegg4• 4 years ago

HTML is already a markup language. You could just as easily make basic websites using HTML and some basic inline CSS.

(They’d even have some extra features missing from Markdown that I’d consider still part of a basic content formatting suite like floating or multi-column layouts. They’d even have a defined standard for machine readable metadata!)

The problem is that people don’t make websites like that very often, even though they can. This is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t currently exist.

buro9• 4 years ago

HTML is a subset of Markdown.

You can include in Markdown any and all HTML.

What Markdown provides here is an even lower barrier to entry for the majority of people... they just write text, learn a fraction more Markdown to so more... and if they want total control they eventually learn HTML too.

It's not mutually exclusive... Markdown includes HTML.

graypegg4• 4 years ago

—I’d say it’s the other way around isn’t it? Wouldn’t Markdown be a subset of HTML, since all markdown can be expressed in HTML but not all HTML can be expressed in Markdown?—

Edit: Markdown can contain HTML that gets meaningfully interpreted as markup as well.

I’d also say HTML is not difficult to write, even for someone new to the concept. I don’t think anyone making their GeoCities homepage was too strained learning HTML, and those were leagues more advanced than what’s possible with only Markdown!

If you want people to be excited about self-publishing online again, it’s probably best to start with the markup language that allows for some fun :)

rchaud2• 4 years ago

Markup is not the barrier to entry. Nobody in 2022 is building HTML-only websites. Even 20 years ago CMSes let hundreds of thousands of people write blogs online.

Let's say somebody takes the time to learn Markdown. Then what?

Are they going to then also learn how to select a web host, how to set up SSL, how to use CSS to make the website look the way they want?

They won't. That's why Wordpress, and later Facebook, won the online publishing wars.

isitmadeofglass• 4 years ago

HTML is a subset of Markdown.

Yes, so all websites are already written in markdown. Its just tjat No browsers support the typical header/list shorthands, but that doesn’t matter because even if they did you’d still need more tages to get interactivity and styling working.

People aren’t imagining a world where markdown makes anything simpler they are imagino by that a format change would make people build less complex websites. But why would they? It’s not HTML that makes the Twitter front end or Facebook complicated, it’s the desisted functionality, which wouldn’t change even if the spice code looked more like markdown and less like html.

ravenstine• 4 years ago

So are Markdown rendering libraries entirely pointless? I'm not sure where you'd get the impression that HTML is a subset of HTML rather than Markdown being a superset of HTML. (even that is very reductive, though)

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

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"

jerf4• 4 years 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.

hospadar• 4 years ago

I mean it _sounds_ good, but how will we cram a million ads down user's throats and measure every twitch of their input devices? It's almost as though the author is suggesting that web site proprietors might be more interested in "serving content" than "driving engagement" which I find disturbing and upsetting.

timdaub8• 4 years ago

haha that's definitely a big component of it all.

But the engaged clickable web is anyways dead. This post is a static HTML file hosted on IPFS with no back links to my carefully curated blog and media presence. No branding. It's because I've accepted that people's bullshit-radar is sensitive towards overly optimized engagement content. Rather I want my text to be read and those that care will anyways online-search me. It's not my idea btw. The web has reached peak clickability: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/has-the-internet-reached-pea...

rroot2• 4 years ago

I wasn't going to read that but I did. I kind of agree, but it's "social media" that's dying not the internet.

The social media has gone absolutely toxic in an frantic attempt to maximize revenue per user.

thrown_222• 4 years ago

I think covid is when the internet jumped the shark for Joe Average.

You would get banned from twitter, facebook, reddit, instagram etc for saying what was official policy until _yesterday_. The sheer insanity of that policy left the terminally online in charge everywhere and the quality of every website suffered. If I look back to reddit posts which google still brings up more than half the people are banned. These are people who wrote thousand word replies to technical problems and were pillars of the community. The only ones left are the mentally ill unemployed since they are the only ones who have time to keep track of what is allowed there.

HN was headed down the same hole until that hilarious post by PG about heretics that got flagged for 8 hours. I imagine at that point it hit everyone in charge here that the people making the most noise were not their friends.

jayd16• 4 years ago

You can do all that in a markdown page just fine, no? Can't you throw a tracking pixel in markdown?

hinkley2• 4 years ago

The cynic in me says you could do this even easier in markdown because you're post-processing all of the content.

emrah• 4 years ago

Markdown could potentially replace HTML as a more succinct markup language but it's not sufficient by itself because it has no way to represent styling and layout. You'd need to jam CSS into it somehow

timdaub8• 4 years ago

markdown is not a markup

Kalanos• 4 years ago

i made https://aiqc.io with readthedocs/sphinx, but wound up doing most pages in html anyways

xigoi5• 4 years ago

Gemini. You're describing Gemini.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

LAC-Tech2• 4 years ago

Gemtext is a bit less capable than markdown, isn't it? IE there's no inline images.

xigoi5• 4 years ago

The whole point is that the client decides the presentation. If it wants to display images as inline, it will, if not, it won't.

rcarmo3• 4 years ago

There are, but the markup is too simple and too "pure" to be useful in any meaningful way.

pie_flavor• 4 years ago

We really need a new publishing tool for everyone that doesn't require intricate knowledge of how the entire web computing stack functions.

That tool is called HTML. It is usually supplemented by CSS. Every Markdown element has a one-to-one translation to it. This webpage is a particular stylesheet, plus basic HTML elements that you could write in <> style just as easily as you could write them in *_# style. If HTML requires particular defaults to look right, then that is a really great reason to fix the defaults, but not a really great reason to junk the whole thing and start over.

Markdown isn't particularly good, it isn't particularly standardized, and it isn't even compatible with reader mode (e.g. images). Just write HTML. Browser standards have not degraded to the point that you need to write a web page differently than people wrote them fifteen years ago for it to look the same; a toolbox with a million complicated tools and one obvious screwdriver is not a toolbox that makes it very hard to unscrew screws.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Shtirlic• 4 years ago

It's already done in Gemini protocol with Gemtext format (https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi)

mdaniel• 4 years ago

This is the only supported list syntax. Using - instead of * like in Markdown will not do anything. Nested lists are not supported.

yeah, no. I can't tell if this is some kind of parody or what

corysama• 4 years ago

So, https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ ?

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

Don't forget that markup refers to the document's formatting and markdown is a specific markup library that converts text-to-HTML. So technically all browsers do support markdown.

We should re-visit the actual term "mark-up" which refers to decorating copy during the editing phase. I think many people agree that using markdown to "mark-up" copy on websites is easier.

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

joshmarinacci• 4 years ago

What you are describing is a technical solution to a business and social problem. It won’t actually solve what you think it will.

jaffathecake• 4 years ago

Completely agree. It's already pretty easy to create a nice readable page with an off-the-shelf stylesheet & semantic markup.

Sites choose not to do that, for non-technical reasons.

For all it's faults, this is partially what AMP aimed to solve, by restricting what developers could do. However, developers/businesses didn't adopt AMP because it was a better user experience, they adopted it because it got them higher up in Google search.

jmull4• 4 years ago

This doesn't really make sense, for a couple reasons...

There are many flavors of markdown. We'd need a standards body, compatibility suites, etc., and for all the browser vendors to adopt it.

Meanwhile, markdown is designed to transform to HTML, which browsers already render. Adding a markdown-to-html plugin/step to your web server or publishing process is not exactly the most burdensome thing, relative to everything else it takes to develop, publish, and maintain a site. And it resolves the markdown flavors issue.

The thing is, people could choose to publish, simple uncomplicated sites now -- it would be cheap and easy, too. The HTML is barely more complicated than the equivalent markdown, and it would take a few lines of CSS to apply a basic style.

The many sites that choose to be complicated, cluttered, and expensive will continue to be so, for the same reasons they are now. Markdown would just be another way to build simple sites, which they don't want.

ajkjk• 4 years ago

There are many flavors of markdown. We'd need a standards body, compatibility suites, etc., and for all the browser vendors to adopt it.

Yes please. Perfect: to want something that can be done; to need something that can happen.

ElevenLathe2• 4 years ago

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.

madeofpalk2• 4 years 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

krono• 4 years ago

Sourcemaps for HTML essentially.

gambler• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

znpy• 4 years ago

I came to write something similar to this, basically.

If anything we should push for websites to divide content from presentation: if html tags were used properly there would be no need for markdown.

And on that matter, pushing for proper use of html tags in documents is a more achievable goal than asking everybody to just drop html and write markdown.

6502nerdface• 4 years ago

Interestingly, your comment is very similar to the Gemini FAQ "2.9 Why didn't you just use Markdown instead of defining text/gemini?" [1]

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi

merb• 4 years ago

https://xkcd.com/927/

jrm44• 4 years ago

I can't meaningfully distinguish any of these criticisms from some you could have made about HTML earlier. None of these are deal-killers.

MajimasEyepatch• 4 years ago

The difference is 30 years of websites and tools being built on HTML. There's an opportunity cost to consider: is formatting simple websites in Markdown and rendering them natively that much more valuable than simply writing them in HTML or using a Markdown-to-HTML tool that it's worth the cost of creating standards, implementing them in browsers, etc. as opposed to putting those efforts elsewhere?

If you were starting from scratch, maybe. But it seems like we've already reached a point where existing solutions for Markdown-to-HTML get you almost all of the value and none of the cost.

jmull4• 4 years ago

The difference is that HTML already exists and browsers support it.

For browsers to also support markdown, there should be some use case that isn’t already well-supported.

timdaub8• 4 years ago

Alphabet is a 1T USD market cap, I‘m confident they could finance implementing 3-5 flavors.

jmull4• 4 years ago

I don't think money is the problem.

It's the extra complexity to move markdown rendering from the control/responsibility of the server side, where it fits naturally, to the user-agent side, where it doesn't -- and for something that site publisher can already do (and evidently, rarely want to do).

coldtea• 4 years ago

There are many flavors of markdown. We'd need a standards body, compatibility suites, etc., and for all the browser vendors to adopt it.

Well, if it were to be adopted by vendors, the many flavors would be a non-problem. They can just agree on a flavor and be down with it. There's CommonMark anyway, they can just use that.

seized4• 4 years ago

Except that CommonMark has its own very annoying things. Like loose lists. Multiple lists of bullet points ends up an ugly mess with CommonMark.

nine_k• 4 years ago

Markdown-based web is actually easy to try.

There is a number of browser extensions that render Markdown nicely. Install one, and get your friends do the same.

Make your web server serve markdown files with a Content-Type: text/markdown or even text/plain header. Put some Markdown files there.

Enjoy. It should just work.

Gibbon1• 4 years ago

I'd be curious about a browser that just does markdown

Dylan168073• 4 years ago

There are many flavors of markdown. We'd need a standards body, compatibility suites, etc., and for all the browser vendors to adopt it.

HTML has had the exact same problems.

You can say "CommonMark spec" and it's solved, isn't it?

funnymony• 4 years ago

Part of the reason for standards committees, is that just saying “this flavour” is not enough to convince everybody.

Standard is not only specification, but also tacit agreement by many parties to use same standard.

People that have skin in the game usually want a say on what flavour should it be.

minhmeoke2• 4 years ago

For people considering adding Markdown support to web browsers or other publishing tools, please consider adopting Djot instead: https://github.com/jgm/djot

It's very similar to the Markdown syntax we all know and love/hate, but fixes many inconsistencies in the spec, and also makes it possible to parse a document in linear time, with no backtracking. It is also much fuller-featured than commonmark, with support for definition lists, footnotes, tables, several new kinds of inline formatting (insert, delete, highlight, superscript, subscript), math, smart punctuation, attributes that can be applied to any element, and generic containers for block-level, inline-level, and raw content.

Some examples, showing how Djot would be rendered into HTML: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jgm/djot/b...

Arainach2• 4 years ago

The primary goal and appeal of Markdown is that it is easy to write. Optimizing for parsing is creating a fundamentally different product.

Standardization of the spec is good. Requiring quirky behavior and blank lines that hurt reading is bad.

divan3• 4 years ago

markdown is designed to transform to HTML

Is it though?

nerdponx4• 4 years ago

More or less, yes.

hoppyhoppy2• 4 years ago

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

From 2004

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

cryptos• 4 years ago

While I consider it a bit unrealistic to follow this approach in a big style, I like the idea. However, I would suggest to use asciidoc instead, since markdown is a bit to constrained. For examples image captions or tables are not possible in markdown.

rchaud2• 4 years ago

Just use a Markdown-based CMS like Pico. Free, open-source, and uses Twig templating.

blipmusic• 4 years ago

Markdown came to be as input for generating HTML, so I don't see why the suggestion is so controversial to some?

    https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Also, as already mentioned, Gemini protocol does exist.

eurasiantiger• 4 years ago

One could use Apache2 .htaccess to set up a directory header/footer which load a script (hidden from listing in .htaccess) which parses a .md file listing into a list of articles, and fetches a couple of the first ones as a front page. Then just use a URL fragment to track which article is open, and fetch & render that article’s markdown fully onto the page.

Disable JS and you have a list of markdown files. Enable JS and get a website.

gjvc• 4 years ago

Yes, we should have open standards for content-types and dynamic fetching and updating of code from trusted locations on the network. Then the browser itself becomes little more than a container for executing rendering code, with plugins for every content-type under the sun. But we are on a different timeline.

With WASM, this may yet still happen.

thih93• 4 years ago

Functionally this seems like reinventing RSS.

And I’d say it’s about time.

ape4• 4 years ago

That page has

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/katex.min.css">
    <script src="http://localhost:8888"></script>

The .css file doesn't exist and what's with the localhost access?

bccdee3• 4 years ago

Markdown is a convenient but deeply limited markup language with only a small subset of html's features. And yes, limitations are good because we want documents not web apps, etc, etc, but I mean "images can't have captions" limited, "navigation bars don't exist" limited. Actual important features of html don't exist in markdown, which is why almost every markdown platform ends up adding extensions and shortcodes. Why use markdown at all? Just use html.

"But html isn't style-agnostic" yes it is. CSS isn't style-agnostic. Instead of a markdown browser, how about a browser with a fixed stylesheet and no js? You don't even need a browser for that, that could just be a userscript that gets plugged into an existing browser. It'd break non-compliant websites that require javascript or custom css, but so would a markdown browser. Most people wouldn't write content for it, but most people wouldn't write content for a markdown browser either.

"But html is cluttered" it doesn't have to be. This is a valid webpage:

    <!doctype html>
    <title>Page Title</title>
    <h1>Page Title</h1>

    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
    Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum.

    <p>Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam.
    Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

Personally, I prefer writing in markdown, but that's no reason to insert a markdown renderer into browsers. HTML can already be as sleek and readable as you want. If we added a new type of markup for anybody with a personal preference, we'd never stop.

fiedzia5• 4 years ago

Plain HTML would be great, its just browsers holding it back. Without CSS, it looks unacceptably ugly.

nwienert2• 4 years ago

just hit reader mode

SoftTalker2• 4 years ago

You can get good looking "plain" html (i.e. readable margins, linespacing, fonts and text size) with a very tiny amount of CSS.

dsego2• 4 years ago

Agreed, classless css to the rescue, eg https://newcss.net/

robinsonb53• 4 years ago

The fatal flaw of HTML (and XML for that matter) is that the tags have the same visual weight as the text they're delimiting, which makes for a sense of clutter even in your minimal example.

Markdown really scores here, by having a pleasing plain text representation as a goal from the outset, and I've love to see it used more widely for web pages.

I'd also love to see it more widely used for offline reading, too - the help files in an application really shouldn't need to invoke a web browser to view them when a lightweight markdown viewer would do the job. Not that there is a lightweight markdown viewer, mind you!

5560675260• 4 years ago

tags have the same visual weight as the text they're delimiting

IMO this issue should and can be easily solved by editor/viewer by rendering tags with lower contrast.

ElemenoPicuares4• 4 years ago

Markdown is undoubtedly more readable, but HTML can be more readable than most people make it. And considering that the ultimate goal is to wind up with a layed-out, styled document, its capabilities in that regard are just plain-old more important, especially since markdown isn't going to replace WYSIWYG editors any time soon, and almost everybody who needs to know HTML can learn it relatively easily. Browsers collapse white space by default, so you've got a lot of flexibility with its formatting:

    <!doctype html>

    <title>
        Page Title
    </title>

    <h1>
        Page Title
    </h1>

    <p>
        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
        adipiscing  elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa 
        euismod vestibulum.
    
    <p>
        Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a 
        varius diam. Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel 
        vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

--or--

    <!doctype html>

    <title>    Page Title    </title>
    <h1>       Page Title    </h1>

    <p>    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
           adipiscing  elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa 
           euismod vestibulum.

    <p>    Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a 
           varius diam. Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel 
           vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

I get why many developers like this idea... Web developers are responsible for implementing the complex user-facing parts, and their primary weapon is text: doing extra work sucks, and when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But developers are not designers, and design not being left to developers in mature organizations is no accident. Absolute, deliberate, limiting simplicity is always an attractive argument if you dismiss the value of, or maybe don't even understand the reason for the complexity. I won't deny the advantages of reader-view-level simplicity in web design: it's easier to visually parse, more performant, and easier to navigate compared to most web pages, similar to how books compare to magazines-- but about 225 million people per year in the US read magazines and I assure you most of them would not choose to have textural printouts in lieu of their current form. While people like having the option of a uniform, grey, easily visually parseable mode to view webpages, that's probably not what they want even most of the time, let alone as a deliberate limitation.

kridsdale2• 4 years ago

IMO the main issue with writing HTML is it takes a two-armed key-chord to do a < or > char.

tannhaeuser2• 4 years ago

HTML is based on SGML, and SGML has short references to handle lightweight custom syntaxes. For example, you can define that an asterisk appearing in your content within a <p> element is replaced by <em>, and moreover define that an asterisk appearing within <em> content is replaced by </em>, toggling emphasized text tags. So SGML very much acknowledges the need for lightweight markup, but the SHORTREF feature, like everything else requiring markup declarations, didn't make it into the XML subset of SGML.

HTML itself doesn't have these and other features (such as basic text macros) because SGML was understood to be available at least at authoring time.

snthpy• 4 years ago

This is a great point.

Mikhail_Edoshin• 4 years ago

Technically XML has some machinery to support more lightweight notations. It won't parse these notations, of course, but the information is accessible to the users of XML reader. The mechanism should work like that:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <!DOCTYPE myDoc [
      <!NOTATION markdown PUBLIC "https://authority.org/markdown/v1.23">
      <!NOTATION rest     PUBLIC "urn:restructured-text/v4.56">
      <!ELEMENT myDoc (note+)>
      <!ELEMENT note CDATA>
      <!ATTLIST note 
        notation NOTATION (markdown|rest) #REQUIRED>
      ]>
    <myDoc>
      <note notation="rest">
        restructured text goes here
      </note>
      <note notation="markdown">
        markdown goes here
      </note>
    </myDoc>

SPBS• 4 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking, by omitting the <html> <head> and <body> HTML can be quite concise [1]. Additionally the closing </li> can be omitted from lists and <li> barely a step over using - for bullet points.

The worst part about HTML is the links, though. Anchor tags are awful. Having to repeatedly type <a href="..."> and closing with </a> is wayyy too boilerplate much for for something that is simply surrounded with [square](brackets) in markdown.

[1] I go to https://meiert.com/en/blog/optional-html/ for reference.

MrVandemar2• 4 years ago

I have the opposite problem. HTML <a href> links are consistent with the rest of the language. <a href>Something</a> makes the same kind of sense as <em>something</em>.

But markdown? I'm always forgetting the order of the (link)[text] or [link](text) or [text](link) or (text)[link]. It's just something that's invented, and not consistent with the rest of itself.

thrown_222• 4 years ago

I've yet to have anyone explain why markdown with it's dozen flavours is better than HTML2: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1866

We broke a weird little markup language into something it was never meant to be because the last tower of crap got too high and collapsed on itself.

Now a webpage is html+css+javascript+a dozen frameworks. People are sick of it and want something better. Well HTML2 is better. Just HTML2, nothing else.

paulddraper2• 4 years ago

Write a list in HTML and write one in Markdown.

The difference in legibility is pronounced.

Especially if you don't want weird whitespace things.

chii• 4 years ago

But why does it matter what the underlying code looks like to the end user?

Nobody complains that the assembly code that runs their application is cluttered and illegible.

bccdee3• 4 years ago

I don't find this illegible in the least.

    <ul>
      <li> Item one
      <li> Item two
      <li> Item three
      <li> Item four
    </ul>

It has advantages over markdown lists, too: You never need to mess with semantic indentation to add additional paragraphs to a given line, and you don't have to manually number ordered lists the way some markdown flavours ask you to.

krick• 4 years ago

Uh, yeah, that's a valid web-page, but I don't see how that counters "html is cluttered" statement. This is cluttered. It… just is. I know some people who suffered some mind deformation in academia and now claim LaTeX is the perfect markup for blogs, but I don't think I've encountered the same for html until now. I mean, does somebody really compose text in html?!

Markdown is deeply limited, that's true, but I often think that there is just a tiny bit of syntax lacking to make it just fine. Some actually is implemented in software like Pandoc or RedCarpet, there are a couple of ways to make tables (some better than others), LaTeX can be employed for formulas, some implementations have checklists, strikethrough, etc. It's just poorly standartized — and the spirit of original proposal (and misleading name) is at fault here as well, since later attempts to invent a standard mean very little when there is a dozen of different common implementations and not a single one is reasonably complete.

By the way, the fact that HTML was supposed to serve as an addition to Markdown doesn't help: you just cannot allow people to submit arbitrary HTML everywhere where something like Markdown is needed. To use it in comments on a forum you need to fully parse it anyway, explicitly enabling or disabling different features of some ubiquitous "full implementation".

Obviously, you cannot make an atrocity like a modern landing page in Markdown+. But… ok, I shouldn't be judgemental and claim such atrocities shouldn't exist — they can, but most blogs, forums (such as this one), etc. — really could have been just "viewer programs" of some standardized format, much more restrictive than HTML+CSS+JS, but a little less limited than Markdown.

All of this isn't very much related to the original topic, but seriously, I dream of some better version of Markdown someday becoming a de-facto standard markup language for all forums, messengers, blogging engines, whatever the general name for Jira is… You know what I mean.

I don't really have a solution, it just really feels like there shouldn't be that many additional features. A couple more of emphasis options, a couple less ways to do the same thing (I mean, it's stupid to convert all of */-/+ to the same <li> elements), colors, better image embeddings (with captions), sidenotes, better ways to handle formulas (there are enough dedicated literals in Unicode to construct most simple formulas without the need for LaTeX, but they still need to be parsed to be rendered pretty) and simple UML-like stuff… I'm pretty sure the comprehensive list of features for 6-σ usecases cannot be THAT huge. Big, yes. Not endless. And most features surely have some "plain-text" (or very light special syntax) representations.

I realize that it was pretty much the intention behind HTML + CSS. But HTML + CSS stopped being that a very, very long time ago. 30 years have passed. By now, we should have a little better sense of what's needed to write & render most texts.

MrVandemar2• 4 years ago

I mean, does somebody really compose text in html?!

Yes.

I use HTML the way people use markdown: as an open, easy to read, easy to write, plain text format for taking notes, writing articles, etc.

I find this quite intuitive and easy – partly because I’m an old-school web-developer from days of yore and I have HTML deeply internalised; partly because I use the abbreviated version of HTML noted above; and partly because I use a VIM plugin called Emmet which allows you to construct complex HTML fragments with a basic shorthand.

The reason why I use HTML instead of markdown is threefold.

* The first is that simple HTML, written with a little care, is readable as-is, and requires no transformation to see it looking pretty (just open in a browser). Markdown requires pandoc to turn it into something else.

* The second is that it is a semantically rich language, full of useful tags for expressing document structure and context for words and sentences. I find Markdown really confining.

* The third reason is that, if I take the care to fill in the basic author/keyword/desc meta-tags I can run scripts over my directories looking for and indexing things. Who cares Search Engines don’t use some of those tags anymore. I do.

Possibly they’re not entirely compelling reasons for anyone else to adopt HTML over markdown, but they work for me.

fiedzia5• 4 years ago

it just really feels like there shouldn't be that many additional features. A couple more of emphasis options, a couple less ways to do the same thing

There was a language like that once, it was called HTML. It had very basic set of features initially, but then someone needed text to blink, someone needed to display videos, someone needed to send forms, someone needed to use it to play games and here we are today, and it's not done yet. If it was implemented today, you will get exactly same result in near future, because everyone's "small set of features" together adds to infinity.

minhmeoke2• 4 years ago

For a static document markup language, Djot does a rather good job: https://github.com/jgm/djot

It's very similar yet much fuller-featured than commonmark, with support for definition lists, footnotes, tables, several new kinds of inline formatting (insert, delete, highlight, superscript, subscript), math, smart punctuation, attributes that can be applied to any element, and generic containers for block-level, inline-level, and raw content. In addition, it resolves ambiguities in the commonmark spec and parses in linear time with no backtracking.

Further discussion lower in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33553293

Quickstart for Markdown users: https://github.com/jgm/djot/blob/main/doc/quickstart-for-mar...

Some more in-depth examples, showing how Djot would be rendered into HTML: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jgm/djot/b...

inopinatus2• 4 years ago

only a small subset of html's features.

On the contrary - Markdown is essentially a superset of HTML, so unless you're using a renderer that strips it from the input, you can have the best of both worlds.

This property was super useful for a lightweight CMS I threw together a few years and which is still used by the original customer today. 99% of what they need to render is easily authored in Markdown, and this further helps ensure a commonality of style and device portability.

bobmaxup• 4 years ago

Flavors of Markdown might be a superset, but as it is normally used, I don't think many would say that Markdown has all the abilities of HTML.

bccdee3• 4 years ago

The original markdown parser supported html because it was basically just a preprocessor that added some syntactic sugar to html. The proposal here isn't just "what if browsers had a markdown preprocessor" (although I also think that would be questionable), but "what if browsers limited content down to only markdown, so that the web was all just clean, style-agnostic documents," and that clearly requires that markdown not support arbitrary html.

martyalain3• 4 years ago

It's said that the father of LISP, John McCarthy, lamented the W3C's choice of SGML as the basis for HTML : « An environment where the markup, styling and scripting is all s-expression based would be nice. » The {lambda way} project could be an answer, small and simple: http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/

In lambdatalk such a HTML code

    <h1>Page Title</h1>

    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
    Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum.

    <p>Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam.
    Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

is written like this

    _h1 Page Title

    _p Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum.

    _p Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam.  Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

And you can also compute 3x4 writing {x 3 4} or compute the factorial of 100, compute a Fast Fourier Transform, draw complex graphics, ... it's a true programming language with a coherent syntax, unlike Markdown.

awinter-py• 4 years ago

I mean rendering JSX would be incredible from a 'I hate waiting for build' perspective

babel has a trick where you load their JS and mark your <script type="text/jsx">, but it is slow AF

more generally, pluggable templating / rendering engines would be neat

pclmulqdq• 4 years ago

We already do. They use static site generators to produce HTML (a good interchange format) from a customized form of markdown (which is not standardized at all and very customizable). This state of the world is totally fine - it works well for both viewers and content producers.

proser• 4 years ago

This gets at the key difference between the two. Markdown is for authoring and HTML is for presentation.

cto_official• 4 years ago

I think the problem is correct, but the solution of markdown is not.

samatman• 4 years ago

As a compromise, might I suggest:

    <markdown class="commonmark">
    <![CDATA[
    # It's Markdown!

    Sure _is_
    ]]>
    </markdown>

forgotmypw17• 4 years ago

Markdown results in unintentional formatting more frequently than not in my experience, and it is this reason alone that I avoid it anywhere I have a choice to, including any software I implement.

douglaswlance• 4 years ago

You already can render markdown. It shows as what it is: text.

If you want to render markdown as something else, you need to define what that other thing is. If you're suggesting we render it as a webpage, well webpages are made of HTML and CSS--so you're saying you want to render markdown as HTML/CSS.

We can already do that. There are a plethora of tools available to do that.

timdaub8• 4 years ago

HTML is also plain text. The blog posts defines it. Pretty render md to a perfectly readable text like reader mode on all browers and aspect ratios.

notriddle2• 4 years ago

I've seen a few people on here recommending everything from "just use HTML" (which misses the point) to "just use Gemini" (which misses the point even more).

Why not HTML? Why not Markdown? They aren't self-contained.

* A web page written in either format can leak your IP address to external bad actors because of the way inline images work.

* Loading resources from more than one server is a reliability and security problem, and it performs bad on initial load (it's great for subsequent loads, since external resources can be cached, but initial load time is bad and tech designers should really spend more time thinking about worst-case perf than about average-case).

* Downloading a web page is overly complicated. I should be able to download a page to my computer and never have to worry about the origin server going away, and that's not possible on the HTML5 web. This is one of the main reasons for the enduring popularity of PDF. IPFS, in particular, would benefit from a self-contained document format, because it needs to know the full set of dependencies in order to pin a page as a whole, and ensure that you don't accidentally pin an HTML file without pinning its images and wind up with a broken site.

Sure, you can make HTML pages that are self-contained, but because they aren't always, people don't build workflows around them.

Why not Gemtext/Gemini?

* Nobody but nostalgic nerds cares about simplicity of implementation. I mean, come on, Markdown is even harder to parse than HTML is! Nostalgic nerds might be a worthwhile demographic to appeal to, but I think IPFS wants a wider audience than that.

* Inline images are not optional. Too many great creators with a lot of worthwhile things to say are either creative artists or technical artists. In the BBS era before inline images were practical, it didn't stop people from drawing; they just relied in ANSI and ASCII art, and "let's go back to typewriter art" only appeals to nostalgic nerds.

* And once you have inline images, you have to offer rich text layout features like tables, otherwise people will start posting pictures of text to work around your missing features (which sucks for either accessibility, because blind people can't read them, or it sucks for simplicity, because deploying OCR is even more complicated than just offering decent text layout).

If I had to pick something? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

* You can download an EPUB, and when the original host goes away, it still works! Pinning an EPUB in something like IPFS can work without requiring the CDN to know anything about the file format, since EPUBs are self-contained.

* Tooling already exists. It's just XHTML in a ZIP file anyway, but there's also EPUB-specific tooling (for example, the Texinfo release announcement a few days ago mentioned that you can export EPUBs from GNU info manuals).

* It supports text and image layouts that writers demand.

* There is one standard.

willi59549879• 4 years ago

Edge (the version that was killed) was able to read epubs. I quite liked that feature. Now I just use an e-reader or pdf

fiedzia5• 4 years ago

Self-containment is entirely unrelated to a format. You could do self-contained markdown, HTML or anything else if you wanted to.

notriddle2• 4 years ago

Of course it's related to the format. Many formats, like PNG and Gemtext, are inherently self-contained, while other formats, like HTML and SVG, are not.

Annoyingly, EPUB isn't inherently self-contained [1], but external access is explicitly optional [2], and it does make self-containment easier, because you can reuse resources across multiple pages, whereas HTML requires you to either duplicate the resources across multiple pages, or you have to build your thing as a single massive HTML page.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/epub/#sec-resource-locations

[2] https://www.w3.org/TR/epub-rs/#sec-epub-rs-network-access

fasteo• 4 years ago

... so that in 10 years Markdown will become the same clusterf*ck as HTML is today

e40• 4 years ago

Website is broken, but I infer from the comments that this would fit the bill:

https://github.com/DannyBen/madness/

My company uses it internally for a load of things. I love writing in MD and pushing to gerrit and when it is submitted the change is live.

caseyf• 4 years ago

er if we are talking about creating documents without CSS and JS, HTML is way better than Markdown

varispeed• 4 years ago

Can someone explain what is the point of ipfs? I visited the homepage and it mostly shows an information about what it is not and disadvantages of things that are not ipfs.

But I am struggling to understand why would I want to use it and how?

For instance, can I host a website on it? Can I put a wordpress on it? How can I share my website with someone? Can I use my own domain? Or is it like FTP? I really don't get it and feels like I am missing out.

TOGoS• 4 years ago

It's a distributed content-addressed datastore, like Git or Bittorrent or Gnutella or Freenet, but maybe trying harder than any of those to be a direct replacement for web servers. I think they aim to make "ipfs://whatever"[1] a URI scheme that's supported in web browsers alongside "http://whatever".

[1] I can't find the page explaining the URI scheme, but as I recall the double-slash felt vaguely out-of-place when I did once upon a time read it, and I have never been able to take the project as seriously as it seems to want to be taken (flashy website with 'whitepaper' etc) partly because of that detail. The underlying idea about a distributed content-address datastore is a good one, but I feel like they're making it more complicated than it needs to be. https://www.nuke24.net/docs/2015/HashURNs.html is somewhat a response to it.

donatj2• 4 years ago

You could presumably just add a single line of JS to a markdown file that would render it as HTML.

yasenn• 4 years ago

There is strapdown: https://github.com/chaitin/strapdown-zeta/blob/master/README...

``` <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <title>Hello, Strapdown</title> <meta charset="utf-8"> <xmp theme="cerulean" style="display:none;"> # title your awesome markdown content goes here... </xmp> <script src="http://cdn.ztx.io/strapdown/strapdown.min.js"></script> </html> ```

donatj2• 4 years ago

Interesting, but I feel like ven this is over built.

    <script src="imaginary-script"># Hello World

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

I hate markdown. Try to find a list of supported syntax highlighting for code blocks.

fedeb95• 4 years ago

The article should probably read: we should write more simple websites. A few lines of css does the trick, usually. That's what I do in my tiny website http://scriptkid.it I learned from someone who posted here on HN the <p> trick.

paxys• 4 years ago

This misses the real point of Markdown, which isn't to be simple or opinionated but to be readable by the end user in both forms (raw or rendered).

In case of a web site there is never the expectation of the source being easy to read for the end user. If you want to create a simple page – great, go for it. The only minor change will be replacing markdown tags with HTML ones. And there's plenty of tooling which does that trivially.

XCSme2• 4 years ago

of the source being easy to read for the end user

But the source is easier to read for you (the author), directly in your code editor or even simply edit the file live on the server via FTP or SSH.

uses• 4 years ago

HTML / CSS ended up being extremely granular and hackable while missing the big building blocks that would have readily matched the structure of the web - things like navigation menus or page outlines. We waited over a decade for the layout systems to catch up to developer needs while creating buggy float-based grids. It's an outlier that media queries were already in widespread availability when mobile really started picking up.

rubyist5eva• 4 years ago

Screw that I want C++ rendered websites.

JW_00000• 4 years ago

What happens currently if you send a file with content type text/plain to a browser? If the browser would just render it (maybe in a monospace font), you're already halfway there, without needing to embed a Markdown renderer in the browser.

jrm44• 4 years ago

People are "big-picture" missing why this is an important idea. I had a prof put it like this once: The great tragedy of the web is the following:

HTML made the web easy to read.

But you know what made the web easy to write? Facebook. Facebook was undeniably the technology that made it so that roughly everybody could write things on the web to be read by everyone.

I really like the direction of this, because it points toward the possibility of a "web that is easy to write."

greenthrow3• 4 years ago

This is nonsense. There were tons of things that made the web easy to write before FB. That is not what made FB successful. It was a combination of a lot of little features plus the big innovation that your profile had to be your real life identity early on. That was the thing prior social networks didn't do. It enabled the uniquely Facebook experience of being able to find past friends and more distant family.

jrm44• 4 years ago

What technology IN REALITY, raw numbers, got more people to "type something into their computer for the purpose of multiple other people to read?"

Facebook, and nothing else much comes close.

(Again, I say this as someone who mostly hates it)

richardfey• 4 years ago

It enabled the uniquely Facebook experience of being able to find past friends and more distant family.

This came afterwards. In the beginning it was just a showcase of life moments to share with others. Lots of fun and lots of cringe.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

the big innovation that your profile had to be your real life identity early on.

This came after facebook was wildly successful, so not early on. I also have never met a single person who was attracted by it, or was confused as to who their friends were before it existed. That being said, tying real names to online identity allowed facebook to buy data from brokers to fill out the sliced up audiences they sell to advertisers, so maybe it was important to their profitability.

What made FB successful was that it was a platform that other developers could program for, so it filled up with games and quizzes. Farmville, "Which Harry Potter Friends Spice Girl Are You?" etc. was all the edge that it took to kill myspace, a site which seemed to stop any sort of development about 10 minutes after launch.

But, as you say, even myspace made it very easy to write on the web. You could scribble on other people's "walls", put whatever you wanted on your own page, and every profile came with a blog.

Against what you say, however, is the timeline where you could just post random crap and all of your friends would see it and comment on it; the dopamine stream. There's no easier way to write than to spit out a random sentence or upload a random picture, and broadcast that instantly to hundreds of people.

irrational• 4 years ago

LOL. Apparently I am old, but I remember the web before Facebook (or Google or…) existed. Everybody could (and many did) write on the web before Facebook. Geocities, My Space, or just create your own website. Believe it or not, but it was far simpler and cheaper to create your own website back then. There were tons of free hosting sites back then. You know what killed all of that? Facebook. This is why I am excited by the notion of Facebook dying. Maybe we can get back some of what we lost.

Izkata4• 4 years ago

I remember my first website experiment, hosted on "20megsfree". 20 megabytes of free hosting on a subdomain, they'd put an ad banner at the top, and you could pay for more / to remove the banner.

..and oh wow the domain still exists. Homepage is unchanged from 2001. Copyright line in the footer stopped updating in 2005 though so no idea if it would still work...

whywhywhywhy• 4 years ago

Markdown having *italics* _italics_ **bold** __bold__ instead of _italics_ *bold* was such a mistake.

No idea how non-technical people were ever supposed to grasp that.

dredmorbius• 4 years ago

Agreed.

So does John McFarlane, the author of djot (and perhaps more widely known, Pandoc):

<https://github.com/jgm/djot>

My own convention when writing Markdown is to use single underbar for _italic_ and doubled star for **bold**. Except of course on GlitchSoc (a Mastodon server), where underbars give underscores, and single or doubled stars are for italic / bold respectively.

But otherwise, if I see a singleton star or doubled underbar in my own writing, I'm pretty sure I've typoed something.

chrismorgan5• 4 years ago

My observation of English-language typewriter and early plain-text computer usage (documents and emails) is that * was mostly used as equivalent to italics, ** and *** for stronger emphasis were not particularly uncommon (bearing in mind that traditionally there was simply no such thing as bold). But _ was kind of a historical oddity, with underlining used in lieu of italics in the typewriter era for technical reasons, implemented by means of overwriting; underscore-surrounding came much later, and never seemed particularly popular to me, and was more often interpreted as underlining rather than as italics—though the typewriter remarks are certainly still relevant, as underlining had for a while changed somewhat in semantics.

I say Markdown’s error was doing anything with underscores at all, especially given the programming context and the prevalence of underscores in snake_case and SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE (Python being most heavily affected with its __magic__ methods, so that all implementations will be affected, rather than only some that have gone a certain way on word boundary matching), and it should have just been *italics* and **bold**.

Semantically, view italics as emphasis and bold as strong emphasis (basically where HTML 4 headed with <em> and <strong>), and the doubling of the asterisk makes perfect sense. The asterisks are an intensity modifier.

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

I've been using Hugo to translate Markdown into my static site, and I've been extremely happy with it.

Animats2• 4 years ago

We could just go back to HTML 1.0, which is roughly equivalent to Markdown.

Animats2• 4 years ago

The amusing thing is, that's what his Markdown translator is doing. Look at the page source. There's a fixed CSS preamble, and then there's very basic HTML 1.0:

    <body>
    <h1>Why We Should Have Markdown Rendered Websites</h1>
    <p>You're viewing this document in your HTML-rendering browser but its 
       source is actually a markdown file.
    </p>
    ...
    <pre><code>// file: http://home.md

    [home](http://home.md) [about](http://about.md)

    this my homepage

    // file: http://about.md

    [home](http://home.md) [about](http://about.md)

    this my about page
    </code></pre>
    ...
    <p>Best,
    Tim Daubenschütz <a href="mailto:tim@daubenschuetz.de">tim@daubenschuetz.de</a></p>
    <h2>References</h2>
    <ul>
        <li>1: https://gist.github.com/JoeyBurzynski/617fb6201335779f8424ad9528b72c41</li>
    </ul>
    </body>

That's it. That's his HTML. You could write that by hand.

robocat2• 4 years ago

If Google upranked “documents” (simple HTML content without JavaScript), then there would be an incentive to publish simple content.

Instead Google goes to insane lengths to parse JavaScript generated abominations, and otherwise allow/encourage shitty content.

zzo38computer4• 4 years ago

Which search engines do not execute JavaScript codes?

chrismorgan5• 4 years ago

I last paid active attention to this in mid-2017. At that time, Google mostly, eventually executed JavaScript, but it would often be weeks after initial indexing that any JavaScript execution happened; and there were rumours but scarcely more that Bing could execute JavaScript; and I know of no other engine doing any JavaScript. By mid-2018, Bing definitely sometimes did some JavaScript execution (see https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/bing-javascript/). It’s probable things have become a bit more consistent by now, but actually loading pages realistically is so much more expensive than just parsing the initial serialised HTML that I think you can reasonably expect JavaScript-execution to be less consistent and reliable as they will very probably continue to prefer to avoid loading things that way if it’s not obviously required.

peter_retief• 4 years ago

I love using vitepress, https://vitepress.vuejs.org/ Simplification of web development letting the main focus be on content and style.

ludwigvan• 4 years ago

This is a great idea. First browser that implements this natively gets my vote!

schkolne• 4 years ago

This convo reminds me of MDX -- https://mdxjs.com/ -- allows you to mix JSX with markdown, popular for making documentation pages for design systems.

A lot of the limitations of MD mentioned here are alleviated by allowing arbitrary JSX, which of course is optional for users who want something more basic.

ilaksh• 4 years ago

Reminds me of some related ideas I had: https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

aliqot• 4 years ago

YES THIS IS MY MOMENT!!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33505339

groffee• 4 years ago

I thought the real purpose of markdown was to let your users use HTML on your site but without the security risks of letting them use 'pure' HTML.

hinkley2• 4 years ago

There are some of us that think Markdown should be like this but it isn't. There are implementations in some languages that auto-escape any embedded HTML in a Markdown document, but for others they pass through.

That makes Markdown great for content when the authors and system owners are the same people. Not so great for content submissions from anonymous and potentially hostile third parties.

The project I originally had in mind for learning Elixir would have been Markdown based but there is no flag for disabling inline HTML in the current parsers and writing my own seemed like a bridge too far.

robocat2• 4 years ago

Deliver as markdown, but with a single line header:

  <!DOCTYPE html><title>Foo</title><script src=mydelayedmarkdownparser.js></script><PLAINTEXT>
  [[insert your markdown here]]

A document delivered as pure markdown, that will get spidered by any search engine that renders JavaScript (or that reads the document as text), and you don’t need to ask anyone to change anything. HTML has no closing </plaintext> end tag, so markdown can be free-form and securely include any unescaped <>”’ characters (raw HTML code) you need into your markdown and the browser will treat it as pure text (unlike the <XMP> tag which can be ended with </XMP> - even weirder lexing).

The key is that although the <plaintext> tag is deprecated, every browser has to support it (partially because removing support for <plaintext> would cause security issues for existing pages!) The <plaintext> tag is really very special, quite different from any other tag, and it radically interrupts HTML document lexing/parsing.

Use something like https://whatismarkdown.com/how-to-have-markdown-in-realtime-... to read the content of the <plaintext> and dynamically render your markdown into HTML.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/pl...

Edit: and of course there is the HTTP header Content-Type: text/markdown which could be used by browsers to render a markdown document - see “The text/markdown Media Type” RFC https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7763.html and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Co...

zzo38computer4• 4 years ago

What is needing then, is adding the "type" attribute in <plaintext> command, that browsers with their own implementation can optionally use it instead in order to render with the user's settings if desired.

However, that still forces you to serve HTML, so it is not good. My idea is adding a "Interpreter" response header, which indicates which files can be used to render files (documents, audio, video, pictures, etc) that the client implementation does not understand already. The end user can also specify their own overrides, if desired.

chrismorgan5• 4 years ago

Fun related fact people may not be aware of: you can do basically this with arbitrary XML files, defining a stylesheet which transforms the XML into HTML however you like using XSLT. As an example, Atom feeds on my website (such as <https://chrismorgan.info/blog/tags/meta/feed.xml>) render just fine in all mainstream browsers, thanks to this processing instruction at the start of the file:

  <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/atom.xsl"?>

(Mind you, XML is hard to work with in browsers, because it’s been only minimally maintained for the last twenty or so years. Error handling is atrocious (e.g. largely not giving you any stack trace or equivalent, or emitting errors only to stdout), documentation is lousy, some features you’d have expected from what the specs say are simply unsupported, and there are behavioural bugs all over the place, e.g. in Firefox loading any of my feeds that also fetch resources from other origins will occasionally just hang, and you’ll have to reload the page to get it to render; and if you reload the page, you’ll have to close and reopen the dev tools for them to continue working.)

indymike• 4 years ago

Adding a markdown handler to a web browser should be pretty trivial, and that's probably why it makes little sense to do it.

rroot2• 4 years ago

The majority of the content you read on the web is there to lure your retinas so the website can shove sponsored photons into them.

The goal of de-cluttered web is nice. But if clutter is even just a notch more profitable, that ain't going to happen.

RajT88• 4 years ago

Agree with many folks here:

Markdown is not sufficient for the task of expressing the modern web.

All that said... We shouldn't stop thinking of ways to reimagine what the WWW actually is.

Why not create a new web-browsery thing which uses a totally different language, totally different paradigm for composition, heck why not a totally different network transport?

If you think that sounds dumb...I just described the current state of Netflix.

colmmacc• 4 years ago

This reminded me that a long time ago I used S3 website's error handling feature so that S3 could render simple markdown files as HTML natively: http://composedit.net/

http://composedit.net/dickens is actually a 404 error that fetches http://composedit.net/text/dickens.md and uses Javascript to render it. Unbelievably dumb but works. Serverless before there was serverless!

malkosta• 4 years ago

One line website renderer with pandoc. Apply template.html to all .md files in current folder.

  find . -maxdepth 1 -name \*md -exec sh -c 'pandoc --quiet --template template.html "$0" -o ${0%.*}.html' {} \;

friend_and_foe• 4 years ago

There's Gopher, Gemini, a myriad of static site generators that render markdown...

I like the idea of my browser rendering markdown. But it's not going to solve the problem, as long as the same client application that renders documents can also render web applications, people looking to bait you with a document into running software on your machine will just publish web applications with some text inside of interest to you. What's needed is separate client software for running web applications and rendering documents, and a different protocol for each, where we fucked up was using http for everything.

zzo38computer4• 4 years ago

While I believe you, and that the currently state is too messy, nevertheless it is possible for some implementations to be more limited or to have options for the user to disable some features if desired.

It is true, there are other protocols and other file formats they are good for different purposes, and you should not try to use one for everything. (In my opinion, this is true of Unicode as well; it is messy and doesn't work well to use Unicode for everything, either, nor HTML or HTTPS for everything, or cell phones for everything, or the government for everything, etc.)

It would also be possible to serve text/gemini files with HTTP too, and I also have modified my browser to be able to display them (also local files too), this is not common.

nonrandomstring• 4 years ago

A good summary.

People forget what the M in HTML stood for.

The slow drift of Hypertext from nice separation of document markup and presentation to "web applications" and browsers that are mini operating systems makes those old jokes about Emacs pale in comparison.

The modern bloat-ware browser is a calamity of code, most of which I have no use for and no trust in. So I use a text based browser without JavaScript - and I love it!

If I want to run your code on my machine I'll install a proper application that has at least been through some basic code signing, packaging and secure distribution channels.

Gemini seems like one of the few hopes for breaking away from the madness of "Web" and restoring some sort of sane, plain document publishing for ordinary people to read and share information.

synergy20• 4 years ago

Or browser just renders markdown directly.

PedroBatista• 4 years ago

We already have HTML

What we have done to it it's a different matter.

Btw, which flavor of Markdown?

"and if I want to do..?"™ Don't we'll end up with an HTML without angle brackets?

littlecranky67• 4 years ago

I had similar idea and created MDwiki in 2013 (now unmaintained): https://dynalon.github.io/mdwiki/#!index.md

zzo38computer4• 4 years ago

I get a 429 error.

lolive2• 4 years ago

Me buying the domain name react-markdown.com and the github repo "react-markdown"

...

PROFIT !!!

lolive2• 4 years ago

Damn! Already too late !

karaterobot• 4 years ago

Two problems:

Most people don't want the simple websites you could render in basic Markdown, that's why we don't have more of them already. How many of the top 1000 websites are a column of text and nothing else?

If most people wanted simple websites, they would write them with a WYSIWYG editor, they would not learn Markdown.

bonestamp22• 4 years ago

Something pretty similar already exists, and it's free... Github pages can turn your markdown into a website, hosted for free: https://www.markdownguide.org/tools/github-pages/

fleddr• 4 years ago

It most certainly would not be a bad idea to have .md files render natively in a browser. Browsers also natively render images, videos, PDFs.

That said, the idea that this somehow changes any dynamic on the web are mere fantasies. The masses self-publish on social networks. On their phones. And not even that, as most largely lure.

VancouverMan• 4 years ago

Aside from perhaps images, I wish that browsers didn't try to render more complex content. I'd much rather be able to easily watch YouTube and embedded videos, for example, in an external player. And I've almost always ended up reopening PDFs in an external viewer, or configured the browser to do that by default where that option exists.

Maybe Markdown isn't as much of an issue as the videos and PDFs are, but it seems to me like it's better handled externally from the browser, or perhaps by an optional browser extension.

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

We should have multiple formats besides HTML. In fact we already do have this, in the “Content-Type” response header, we just should use it more

Send data with Content-Type text/json and Firefox will display a fancy JSON viewer, send data with text/plain and Firefox displays plain text, pdf files, downloadable files, etc. Well, we can add text/markdown where the browser automatically renders markdown files. And when the next HTML replacement comes out we can add that as well.

What about backwards compatibility? We already have that too: webservers can check the User-Agent request header, and return converted data for older browsers. Though we’d need a centralized database or fallback solution to support niche browsers…

tomp• 4 years ago

The author is lying. The source isn't actually a markdown document, the source is HTML (you can easily verify this by right-clicking and selecting "View Source")

It's actually quite easy to actually render markdown pages in a browser. Start with this:

    <!doctype html><meta charset="utf-8"><script src="notes-all.js"></script><textarea>
    ## MarkDown *HERE*!!!!!

and "notes-all.js" contains something like this:

    document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css">'));
    document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', (event) => {
      var m = markdownIt({'html': true, 'linkify': true});
      var t = document.querySelector('textarea');
      var d = document.createElement('div');
      d.setAttribute('id', 'content');
      d.innerHTML = m.render(t.value);
      t.replaceWith(d);
    });

followed by markdown-it source code

harryvederci2• 4 years ago

I think the author means that they wrote a markdown document, which then was transformed (by a CI/CD pipeline, for example) to the html you see when you inspect the source.

I like your "Serve markdown, transform through a client-side script" approach though, so upvoting nonetheless.

tinyspacewizard• 4 years ago

I would like Markdown encoded as s-expressions... but watchagonnado

hit8run• 4 years ago

Why not simply use text/plain content type when going fully minimal?

frankus• 4 years ago

One thing that's always been a source of a tension for me is how to handle navigating around a "web of documents".

There are limits to what you can do with "in-band" links in the text before they get to be contrived, awkward, and non-discoverable.

Users seem to have a revealed preference for on-page links to barely-related URLs and want those links to have some spatial consistency over time. So that means adding some "fluff" (nowadays presumably nested in a <navigation> tag) to every document.

One past experiment with out-of-band navigation was framesets, but they had some significant issues (not least of which is that the URL pointed to a container rather than the contained document).

Are there some other interesting experiments with out-of-band navigation? Or is adding some semantic tags to HTML as good as it gets?

err4nt• 4 years ago

With modern HTML it's actually pretty easy to use markdown wherever you like. Though there is no built-in markdown element, they have built in the ability for authors to define custom elements. You can define your own custom <mark-down> element and put your mark down syntax inside and as it is, as source code it's nice and human readable even if we didn't do anything further. But we can also define how this element should render, and so it's very straightforward work to wire up any existing "markdown to HTML" library in JavaScript to consume the markdown contents of the tag and display rendered HTML.

This is so easy to do, not just for markdown, but almost anything you could want to embed or work with in HTML.

kderbyma• 4 years ago

My personal website is done similarly. I built it on top of markdown and added my own shortcodes so I could add macros and custom plugins as I added.

The site code lives separate from the post, media, and general 'content' and doesn't care what content is provided.

innocentoldguy• 4 years ago

I like Markdown and use it at work, but I think Asciidoc is a better markup language because it is more consistent and has support for more things than Markdown does (e.g., better table support, callouts, tips, etc.).

I currently use 11ty with the Asciidoc plugin for building websites. This setup is nice because I only have to fiddle with HTML and CSS during the design phase. Once that's done, nearly all my website maintenance is done in Asciidoc. Easy!

I don't think I'd want to directly write an entire website in either Markdown or Asciidoc. I think, eventually, doing so would result in these markup languages becoming as cluttered and weird as the HTML/DOM/JavaScript/CSS mess is now.

I think a better step to improving HTML and CSS would be to have the browsers support Slim (https://github.com/deepin-community/ruby-slim) and Sass out of the box instead. That would make my design phase less wordy and redundant while keeping my Asciidoc experience nice and tidy.

yoro46• 4 years ago

I've been debating on using Org Mode documents to render to HTML and serve those kind of static pages for a blog. I've heard of people doing something similar before (Org -> HTML or Org -> Md -> HTML). But the other part of me wants my own NIHed, over-engineered solution :)

russellbeattie• 4 years ago

OMG, no.

We need to bring text editing into the 21st century where rich text is standardized across all platforms and devices. We can send multicolored emoji to just about any device on the planet, but we still can't bold, italicize, underline or color basic text. It's straight up insane.

Think about it: There is no such thing as "plain text", it's just encoding we don't see.

Even if you're a die-hard keyboard jockey, unless you're looking at your command line and mentally parsing raw ANSI encoding like \e[1mBold, you're not using "plain text". There's tons of encoding underneath every text editor and terminal program, you just don't see it. We already have a standard encoding for rich-text, we need to start using it. It's called HTML, and every device with a screen on the planet knows how to display it. We just need to hide the tags everyone bitches about just like vi hides a highlighted line's \e[43mYellow codes. We should never need to see it.

Any place we're able to enter text should support rich text, from boot up screen through to apps. And underneath it should all be HTML. It's like the display compositor on macOS. None of us think about the fact it uses PDF under the hood, right? We're not debating whether it should be done using SVG. It's invisible. This debate should have been settled decades ago.

I've been writing about this in detail for the past several weeks. I swear the tech industry has lost its collective minds. At this point I'm truly wondering if Markdown is some sort of cult. We need to kill these lightweight markup formats with extreme prejudice and start solving the real problem.

preseinger• 4 years ago

    Thus, instead of

        - Fruits
          - apple
          - orange
    
    you must write
    
        - Fruits
    
          - apple
          - orange

This is an obvious non-starter.

(edit)

    ...we allow headings to "lazily" span multiple lines:

      > ## My excessively long section heading is too
      > long to fit on one line.

What?

    ...if you open a code span and don't close it, it extends to the end of the paragraph. That is similar to the way fenced code blocks work in commonmark.

      > This is `inline code.

Is this a joke?

Popeyes• 4 years ago

What we (I) need is a simple product flow from Word (the corporate writer of choice) to HTML (the lingo of the web). I thought Markdown might get into Word somehow as an export option (without plugins) but sadly not.

avsteele• 4 years ago

I love this idea. Hope it gets some traction!

syrrim• 4 years ago

My personal take is that markdown is only good when you can customize it to your needs and situation. There are a million markdown flavours, because everyone who ever implements it decides to add their own extensions to it to suit their situation. There have been attempts at creating a single unified standard, but these miss the point: if we wanted a single shared syntax, we could use html directly; the advantage of markdown(s) is that it lets you create something that looks clean and simple as plain text, while turning into a nicely marked-up document. A "standard" markdown would need to have a "standard" extension mecahnism (or none at all...) which would inevitably look like ass for most use cases.

I nowadays usually just write html directly for my personal documents, because I spent long enough messing around with markdown parsers trying to get them to act how I want. But for a website commenting system (eg), it makes sense to spend some time making the formatting system nice to use, which involves customizing your flavour of markdown. I don't think web browsers can or should try to do a good job of this; it requires to many specialized demands for them to be able to create a generic solution. If you want to write in markdown, its easy enough nowadays to format it on the server, or client side with a small js snippet.

arnaudsm• 4 years ago

I built an ultralight markdown CMS with this philosophy in mind : https://github.com/arnaudsm/raito

Just drop index.html on a static server, and it's live.

chatterhead• 4 years ago

Wasn't this the whole point of the XHTML push back in like 2009?

the_af2• 4 years ago

I see some people in multiple comments discussing the need for some sort of standard for markdown if it were to be used for (goals...).

Does nobody else remember the debacle and (limited) fight between Jeff Atwood and John Gruber (markdown's creator) over this?

It was a big deal here, and of course, over at Coding Horror, Atwood's blog. And the reason was: Atwood was calling for some kind of standard, and Gruber actively opposed the mere notion. Gruber claimed ambiguity was baked in in markdown and he didn't want a standard. So take this into consideration before proposing some markdown standards committee: the creator of markdown has said he actively opposes this. I guess he can be bypassed, but what does it say about the future of said standard if the original author says "no"?

_ZeD_• 4 years ago

I'll just ignore Gruber... his sloppyness in defining the details created a myriad of dialects of markdown

the_af2• 4 years ago

I agree with you! My point is that Gruber claims the sloppiness is intentional and actively resists fixing it. And if he -- the creator -- is not on board with standardizing markdown, maybe the whole endeavor is a dead end?

I mean, it could be done even against his wishes, but the project would already be starting with a big negative.

breck• 4 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm biased as I created Scroll, but I can say pretty objectively that at this point it's far better than Markdown and the gap is only going to widen.

Try it out! https://scroll.pub/

bradgessler• 4 years ago

The problem with only using markup to render websites is the lack of navigation.

We need something to show next/previous page (we have rel headers and tags for that) and something that shows a tree navigation structure for populating menus (not sure what exists for that)

The tree structure would need to be “crawlable” because for very large sites, the entire tree can’t be loaded. That could be solved by representing nodes on the tree as URLs that can be loaded by the client as needed.

I’d love to see this happen. I don’t think we need markdown per-se… maybe it’s a subset of HTML that leaves out css, JavaScript, and a lot of the other nonsense.

Is anybody interested in building this out? I have ideas for the server and formats, but would want help implementing the clients.

tapirl• 4 years ago

Feasible only if md is a totally specified format.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

The charm of markdown is there are different flavours, you pick your favourite, and it can evolve independently of the web itself. Making browsers render markdown means markdown needs a single standard, or a standard of specifying standards and some kind of document type declaration, agreement by WHATWG and so on! For what? There are a lot of web publishing platforms for non technical authors. Free and paid. There are also simple programs to turn markdown into HTML. Uploading, hosting, DNS are much bigger barriers than HTML syntax anyway.

somat• 4 years ago

I agree that we should have some diversity in our rich text terminal systems, however I think that markdown is significantly close to the tree(html) that it does not matter much, my candidate is postscript. this is only half a joke, What I would really like to see is diversity in our client side scripting system.

The elevator proposal goes something like this. restructure the browser to expose a virtual machine, then let us do things like (script lang="https://gcc.org/gcc8")...(/script) or (script lang="https://rust-lang.org/165/wvm") or lang="https://python.org/11/wvm", etc, etc. The way we are stuck on javascript is kind of sad.

mehdi_guiraud• 4 years ago

Actually, there's an app that does that : Joplin from https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

you can publicise the markdown text that you're writing in markdown. here's an example with my joplin server and with the desktop app running on linux. I get this link : https://joplin.mehdiguiraud.info/shares/8YBjIJwoNh15uVY900xq...

lakomen• 4 years ago

No we shouldn't. Markdown is just a small representation of markup that gets transformed to HTML.

deafpolygon• 4 years ago

No, why should we do that? Markdown websites just to render it BACK into HTML? That's not the browser's job.

The issue is, Markdown is nice because of its simplicity. The minute you start making it standard and widespread... feature-creep will happen and MD will just have as much noise as HTML does now.

b1nj0y2• 4 years ago

I don't think markdown is simple for those don't know any tech. Those who can write markdown can set up Hugo, Jekyll, Hexo well.

b1nj0y2• 4 years ago

I've create a Hugo blog Template used to create a Hugo blog quickly:

https://github.com/openpress/easy-hugo-blog

gorbypark• 4 years ago

Once upon a time I made a very minimal PoC markdown "browser" in a day or two. It basically had a navigation bar like a browser, only displayed markdown and would only follow links to other markdown documents. It was more of a project to play with React Native for macOS/Windows more than anything serious, but I think the general idea could be neat if implemented correctly in some native GUI toolkits.

dtagames4• 4 years ago

Markdown by definition compiles to HTML and must be rendered by a browser as HTML. This seems to be a widely overlooked fact in this thread.

It's fine to write MD, but know that it's a limited and shortcut form for the real HTML that will be output and rendered.

The short form is great for short stuff but to access the full power of HTML and CSS takes really messy spaghetti MD. And don't even start with JS or TS. Modern sites usually need code and that means web components and that means real HTML and all of CSS need to be present and accessible in an orthogonal way -- not some via MD syntax and some with HTML glommed-onto MD.

martyalain3• 4 years ago

In lambdatalk such a HTML code

    <h1>Page Title</h1>

    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
    Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum.

    <p>Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam.
    Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

is written like this

    _h1 Page Title

    _p Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum.

    _p Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam.  Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

kelsolaar• 4 years ago

Mandatory mention to Markdeep: https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

suprjami• 4 years ago

Jekyll on GitHub Pages does exactly this.

I wrote a dynamic PHP markdown site thing years ago which I still use at work to host Markdown files: https://github.com/superjamie/emdee

nipperkinfeet• 4 years ago

Docsify already does this.

lobocinza• 4 years ago

"towards a presentation-independent data format for text"

Wikitext is more suitable than Markdown for this role though less ergonomic.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikitext

XCSme2• 4 years ago

I also ended up using Markdown to create a blogging platform[0] for my website. It has many benefits as it's a popular format, so you can for example edit and see the result directly inside VSCode.

[0] https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog

gw67• 4 years ago

I wonder why nobody has created a netflix based on Torrent search.

We should have Markdown-rendered websites

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