Hacker News Reader

So instead of rendering the markdown to html once on your computer, you're going to do it every single time on your users' computers? What possible benefit could there be for this, besides unnecessarily burning peoples CPUs?

View on HN

You don't need to regenerate any HTML and changes are instant. Also, I honestly don't think one can burn through too much CPU with occasional JavaScript. This is some hardcore environmentalism.

It's not environmentalism, it's just common sense politeness. There is no reason a users web-browser should have to render something twice just for static content. All just to save you a single `make` before uploading.

I've been joking for a few years that it's only a matter of time until some joker implements a browser in javascript/html5 and the rest of the web development community enthusiastically adopts using it as standard practice. I'm starting to fear that this is more of a possibility than I initially thought.

I doubt that translating a few hundred lines of Markdown into HTML with an efficient JavaScript JIT is noticeably more expensive than, say, decoding a big JPEG picture or displaying a Flash ad, or having menu items slide in and out.

1) It's the principle of the matter. 2) That it might be even comparable to those things is a pretty strong argument against it, afaic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com