Show HN: Markdown as web page/site(github.com) |
Show HN: Markdown as web page/site(github.com) |
But this (along with md-page and mdwiki mentioned in other comments) is actually an interesting small twist on it. Regularly the conversion is done on the server side, and everything is published in html.
Here, you both author and publish in markdown.
What this library does, if I'm reading it correctly, it acts as polyfill that lets legacy evergreen browsers to consume the markdown files that you serve.
You can publish your content in a bit more simpler, yet still declarative format, without any javascript, and still make it accessible, in a properly rendered format, for evergreen browsers.
(Yes, you can still add javascript to markdown files, but it is relatively easy for the agent to just discard any javascript or html.)
The markdown is the source of truth here. No need for rendering everything twice for serving, once for html and once for markdown, and creating a point where their content might diverge.
It's straight out of gemini's playbook.
I think this is a wonderful idea, and if developed a bit further, and adopted more widely, could help push markdown to be a properly supported format in modern browsers.
The next question is, how would you get the second layer of github flavored markdown fluff (latex, mermaid, etc), that is generally not standardized, to be supported in browsers as well?
Don't. GFM should stand for "GitHub Flavored Markup", since that's how people treat it—yet another markup language, which they find more convenient than other markup languages. The "Markdown" as it is used on GitHub and the people who author it abandoned the premise. Markdown was intentionally designed so that the "raw" form of a given Markdown document is supposed to be a valid way for humans to consume it. That's not how Markdown is used on GitHub, however; no one pays any attention to the readability of the raw form. It's just another input for their compile-to-Web pipelines to suck in (or for github.com to render as substitute for a project landing page).
Astro https://astro.build/
I’m not sure what’s the use case for this, but for static content seems wasteful and a bad idea in general.
Yes the performance impact of a single "alert()" when i open the page is negligible. The performance impact of parsing Markdown and rendering it as HTML nodes is definitely non-negligible.
I love the idea to support more markdown formats natively for the web (eg. markdown), but i hate client-side scripting shenanigans that don't respect me as a user without the fancy latest iphone. If only some browsers were concerned about emerging protocols/formats & UX instead of increasingly-useless (except for tracking purposes) JS APIs...
They do use YAML FrontMatter for attaching metadata so the CMS knows how to process certain pages (e.g. page title, page type etc.), but it isn't too complicated in practice: https://learn.getgrav.org/17/content/content-pages#page-file
They also have an admin plugin, which you can use if you prefer a more traditional workflow, even if it just generates the same file format under the hood: https://learn.getgrav.org/16/admin-panel/introduction
I'm actually using an ancient version of Grav for my own blog, although I had to put the admin path behind additional auth (in addition to the one it already provides), for safety: https://blog.kronis.dev/
I really like hybrid systems like that: a CMS for blogging or just writing in general that's based on Markdown, generates static files for decent performance, but is also extensible with additional functionality, and also has a decent web UI if you want one.
(there are probably other CMSes like that out there, or more generic solutions, too)
Of course, the actual use case for the linked solution is a bit different, being able to dynamically render Markdown client side is also pretty cool! Feels almost more flexible in a way.
At work I've been trying to solve the question, how can we let the dev team continue to write documentation as Markdown files in Git repos, while not excluding others in the company who need/prefer GUI and rich text editor. I see now that it's possible to have the best of both worlds, with admin UI as a layer on top of the same underlying system, generating Markdown internally.
Still not sure how such an admin interface will integrate with Git though. I suppose "publish" can trigger a Git commit, but I wonder if it's feasible to ensure no Git push conflict when remote is ahead of local, i.e., someone else pushed a change before you did. Otherwise, I imagine the admin UI can get complex if it needs to provide a way to resolve such conflicting changes, with a side-by-side view of diffs.
Believe there may also be something similar for Apache?
Another alternative that I would suggest is to just serve the files directly (in Markdown or Gemini or PDF or whatever other format they might be). To allow working in a web browser, one idea is to try to implement my idea of a Interpreter response header in web browser, which would be used if the web browser does not understand the file format (if the user has not disabled the use of the Interpreter header). This way, potentially any file format can be implemented.
There is also question about different variants of Markdown. Well, the way to indicate that is by parameters in the MIME type, I think; you can specify if it is Commonmark or something else. This way you can tell which variant it is.
One problem with MIME is that indicating multiple file formats does not work very well. UTI specifies that it is a specific kind of another file format but it must be specified in another file instead of this one and does not have parameters, and has other problems, so UTI is not good either. That is why I wanted to make the "unordered labels file identification" which you can specify, in the same identification, multiple types/parameters, e.g. "text[367]:plaintext:markdown+commonmark".
<html>
<body>
<div class="accordion">
<div class="accordion-item" title="...">
text with markdown syntax goes here
</div>
</div>
<script>
// use showdown.js to convert the innerHTMLin .md syntax to html code
// use bootstrap to make the accordion-item collapsible/expandable
// use js to make a floating TOC
</script>
</body>
</html>
The idea is that having it server-side allows for the page to be cached by a CDN (e.g. CloudFlare), so you end up serving static HTML, with better performance and SEO than JS-compiled markdown.
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/casualwriter/casual-markdown/dis...
Which isn't in the github repo.
(I've used markdown for note taking, not for web pages, hence am asking.)
Just adding this because it can lead to the implication that not supporting IE9 means you're trying to do something frivolous as opposed to "vanilla JavaScript".
Unless using Emacs becomes a user friendly beginner's choice (which it isn't, and that's fine) or Org is able to distinguish itself in isolation from Emacs, I don't see org being widely used anytime soon. If org gains first class support in editors like neovim, vscode and tools like pandoc, mdcat etc, I could see myself using it.
I built two apps for iOS:
There are other org-based tools out there.
What sold me on Znai was the integration of code snippets (straight from source files, mining them out of the code) and integration of diagramming from PlantUML, which is done in a way that is compatible with the format used in Gitlab, VSCode and other markdown renderers.
Markdown has turned into a truly amazing ecosystem.
[1] https://testingisdocumenting.org/znai/introduction/what-is-t...
Is it a lot to set up or is it just markdown all the way and works out of the box?
[1] https://www.mkdocs.org : Markdown to static web page converter
[2] https://rentry.co : Markdown pastebin
[3] https://prose.sh : Markdown blog, upload post via ssh
[4] https://bearblog.dev : Markdown blog, upload post via web-browser
A colleague just mentioned this to me a few days ago:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...
My understanding is this renders markdown to html client side using JavaScript