Show HN: Markdown page – Create a web page with just markdown

Scriptable Word to HTML sounds so useful.

    markdown input.md > output.html

I use <xmp> for html code commenting - see the source code at https://elementcss.neocities.org/

The one thing these markdown examples are missing is a way to do grids! I bet there's a clever way to make columns and rows work.

Main use-case is when I want to share a markdown doc in a private GitHub repo, with a public url e.g http://oscarmorrison.com/md-page/oimasdoijasdmadeupurl-01231...

Their documentation was written in markdown and the site was hosted on static hosting, so no server-side conversion.

Although the web page chrome (navigation, etc) was in HTML, they wanted the documentation to be in markdown under the hood after upload. They didn’t want to use any kind of conversion prior to uploading because they needed to make on-the-fly changes to the documentation after upload without writing in HTML.

So we opted to go with client-side markdown to html conversion on pageload. complete with a clickable legend and tabs to switch between language implementations for code examples.

Putting the markdown inside regular page formatting tags wasn’t reliable, as different browsers did different things to the content (for example some browsers converted “&” to “&amp;” and the indentations for code was not respected). So we had to store the markdown in some sort of preformatted tag block.

However <pre> required special escaping of code characters ( <, >, &, etc).

So we opted to go with using a little-known <xmp> tag to store the markdown as search-engine indexable code. Since content inside <xmp> will be read as plaintext instead of being formatted by the browser, it was also great for being the input of a client-side markdown-to-html converter.

It worked quite well. If you want to see it in action it’s at https://www.genivia.com/dev.html

1. You are editing documents locally on your computer. This lets you double-click to view nice markdown in a web browser with a `file://` url.

2. You are editing a website, but don't have control over the server-side code.

3. You don't want to install a markdown rendering library on the server.

I did little but wruite in HTML from the late 1990s to mid 2010s. Markdown is my preferred route now.

Also conversant in LaTeX, formerly; nroff, DocBook, WP4.2, Wordstar (both with 'reveal codes' capabilities), and probably more. Pandoc is a game-changer.

example.html:

    <script src="mdpage.js"></script><noframes>

    # Header
    Welcome to my simplest site

    - A
    - awesome
    - list

    document.write("<div id=main></div>");

    document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() {
      var script = document.createElement('script');
      script.src = "https://unpkg.com/showdown";
      document.head.appendChild(script);

      var noframes = document.querySelector('noframes');

      script.onload = function() {
        var converter = new showdown.Converter({
          emoji: true,
          underline: true,
        })
        converter.setFlavor('github')
        main.innerHTML = converter.makeHtml(noframes.textContent)
      };
    });

I don't know about dynamic webservers.

https://github.com/crempp/mdweb

It works pretty well, but fairly bare bones and haven't updated it in a bit.

Here [1] is the list of "features" HN supports in the comment section.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Why don't they? Coordination is costly.

So they could but... why should they?

> Wouldn't that be a much simpler and more secure parser than HTML?

No, because Markdown allows for raw HTML, so a compliant Markdown parser must also include a complete HTML parser.

<div markup="markdown">Browser now _interprets_ content as markdown until end of div.</div>

It would make user-submitted content so much better since you could just directly embed bbcode, markdown, etc. without needing to parse it to html or validate that their submission is valid html/only using approved tags, etc.