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. :(
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.
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
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.
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.