Discussion
It would be amazing if all browsers rendered Markdown.
My websites and blogposts would just be Markdown files.
Just ssh/rsync and text files. No more static site generator.
Bliss.
(Yes, I know that Markdown is designed to look okay as-is. To geeks, it just about does. Yes, I could handwrite all the HTML. Yes, I am aware that there are multiple flavours of Markdown.)
@neil you consistently misspelled AsciiDoc, but yeah, that would be awesome!
@neil And I just read today that LibreOffice is planning to add Markdown rendering support 😁 Odd coincidence.
@neil @stroughtonsmith I love the defensive disclaimers 🤣
Like you can see the glasses being pushed up the nose and the knuckles being cracked
@neil I'd be happy if even Mastodon rendered it correctly.
TZAG, sir,
I would like to be the 28th person to reply with a server-side solution to your request for Markdown-in-the-browser support 😆
@Goldmaster Indeed, a static site generator, which this proposal would do avoid :)
@neil
Not the browser rendering Markdown but #Caddy webserver does support rendering Markdown files as web pages. I've used #caddy for many years, solid web server.
Example configuration:
https://til.jakelazaroff.com/caddy/serve-markdown-files-as-html/
Caddy doc's:
https://caddyserver.com/docs/
@neil I love all the caveats on such a reasonable idea.
I would love it if we could write EVERYTHING at work in Markdown. The gains in terms of #accessibility would be immense.
@neil This is one of the situations where JavaScript as an extension engine for browsers makes a lot of sense. The page works perfectly fine without javascript which is only used to spice up representation in ways CSS can't. Still this would sadly need *some* HTML <head> anyway :(
It is a great tool, but unrelated to browsers supporting Markdown?
@neil
I like the plugin for managing projects/documents, it supports markdown. The following feature reminded me of your plight.
:vimwikiall2html
That and pandoc covers me for publishing.
@neil A static site generator as a translation and styling layer adds a lot of value for little effort, though.
@neil I'd be okay with this so long as they rendered *.md and left, say, *.txt alone.
Wouldn't even be hard to do.
The hard thing would be agreeing which sort of markdown!
@neil You could implement this as a web component
@neil The thing about Markdown is that there are 847 different flavours of it, so to start with there would be a couple of decades of religious wars as to exactly which flavour(s) the browsers should support, and of course they'd all end up supporting different ones.
@neil Is there a markdown standard that browsers could code to?
@neil I know it's not what you're looking for, but I was amazed at how close you could get with Caddy (e.g. this blog post: https://til.jakelazaroff.com/caddy/serve-markdown-files-as-html/ ) It could work for simple websites. Maybe even complex ones, I haven't looked at it too closely yet.
@neil I feel like we need a class of browsers that just renders lightweight markups since building a html5/CSS renderer is a very high barrier to entry and is the most undemocratic "feature" of the modern web. One could even use curl for the network layer code
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