A clean start for the web
macwright.com
Daydreaming a post-HTML Utopia

I like this more than you’d think; my whole website is an extended exercise of Doing Cool Stuff with CSS and HTML generated from Markdown, but I always feel a little uncomfortable doing anything too fun when userstyles are not common practice. I could totally create a style switcher with Javascript, but… wouldn’t it be better if that were built into the client?

Reader mode in Firefox is what I’d like to fall back to, but it doesn’t handle my footnotes right now. :(

  • 0x1C3B00DA
    2·
    4 years ago

    Half the time when I see an article on medium or something anyway, I’m just clicking the firefox reader mode, so why can’t there be a web of sites that just serves plain markdown, and a simple markdown browser that renders em?

    Because ordinary users wouldn’t want to use a separate browser to view them. They want to use a single web browser. Also, like @kixiQu@lemmy.ml said, there are a lot of sites that provide something between a document and an app. Lemmy itself is a good example of this. Which browser would you view it in, the document browser or web browser?

    • MayaOPM
      1·
      4 years ago

      Well tbh I think this wouldn’t be for normal users. At least not at first, maybe not ever. I can see wanting a read-only version of Lemmy in Markdown, though. It has nice potential to limit formatting to what can easily be shoved onto an e-reader for offline perusal, too.

      • 0x1C3B00DA
        1·
        4 years ago

        So the current web would be for normal users and a special, document web for techies?

        Don’t e-readers support rendering HTML; epubs are based on HTML, right? And they let you customize the rendering with preset settings (font, line-height, colors) and even custom CSS. So I’m not sure I see the difference in serving a raw Markdown document and an HTML document.

        I don’t see how a separate web would help. Sites that are bloated on the current web just wouldn’t be available on a document web and any sites that were on the document web could already do the same thing on the current web.

        • MayaOPM
          2·
          4 years ago

          If you’re curious about the mindset behind this kind of thing and the article itself wasn’t particularly convincing to you, I recommend the FAQ about the gemini protocol. Particularly under 2.5

          • 0x1C3B00DA
            2·
            4 years ago

            Thanks. I’ve been following Gemini since it was proposed on one of the tildes and I don’t find it convincing either. All of these fork the web proposals leave out non-technical users who aren’t going to care or know about the difference in these protocols and why their browser can’t view that page. I don’t think their argument in 2.5 is adequate. The only people who host Gemini pages are technical people within the fediverse/open web space and its unlikely to ever grow beyond that. If the only people posting there are people you know by handle, you could just as easily only surf their urls on the web.

            I get the creative freedom and excitement that comes from building something from scratch, but these proposals are about building siloed niches instead of improving things for everybody.

            • MayaOPM
              1·
              4 years ago

              I think most of what you’re saying is accurate, but you’re judging these projects by a goal they haven’t claimed for themselves. A backyard garden isn’t trying to fix the food supply chain.