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Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

HTML/CSS are slow. The true way is ".txt"

Edit: I mean this as a sort of lazy way of making a reductio. I don't think .txt is better than HTML/CSS for pages (and I hope that's obvious). I also don't think having no JS is a good idea.

I believe in progressive enhancement, and to a first approximation, I think that all websites have at least one feature that they could implement in JS that would be "a good thing".

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I agree 90% with this; .txt files get most of the job done! ;-) The other 10% where i don't fully agree comprises of hyperlinks; i need me some clickable hyperlinks. :-)

Browser option to make hyperlinks clickable when rendering text files? Or client-side browser rendering of text-based markdown.

Having browsers intelligently render `text/markdown` sounds like a great idea. And while we're waiting on the browser implementation, maybe we can find some sort of temporary workaround to send a markdown parser to the client?

As long as I can make text blink, I'm happy.

Maybe we could just send the raw markdown anyway - it might not be pretty on all clients, but it should be _legible_ on all clients.

Or maybe we could send markdown if the user agent included text/markdown in the request's Accept header, and pipe it through a markdown->HTML filter otherwise.

I would love to see some kind of native markdown support on the web.

A web search turned up this Firefox plugin, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-view..., are there other good ones?

No, hyperlinks failed us. It's all about single-page apps. Put all of your content and all of the content you would have linked to in your .txt. We need someone to build Reactxt.

Whoa whoa whoa, what's some fat cat solution right there! Just use a http header for your content and you're set.

The url should contain all the information so we don't have to make a HTTP request.

I think most news sites implemented this years ago.

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