Comment by nprescott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nprescott | Hacker News Reader

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I wrote up a few of my own thoughts[0] on moving away from writing markdown to writing HTML directly. At this point I have a small bit of code to wrap things into an <article> tag include a <header>, <footer> with links to a home page and include some boilerplate like <meta> tags. I don't think I've sacrificed anything in terms of best practices and actually gained a few things in writing more semantic HTML which I think aid in assistive technologies[1]. I actually hope people will "view page source" on my pages anymore -- a big part of getting to where I am has been testing against alternative browsers like eww and w3m.

[0]: https://idle.nprescott.com/2020/why-bother-with-markdown.htm...

[1]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-05-27-accessibility-through-...

I've been writing HTML directly for my blog [1] for 20 years [2] and back around 2003 I started to be a bit more pedantic about the HTML I use, so I always (try to) close every tag. About five years ago I set up a gopher server [4] and use it to mirror my blog. I went the easy route and decided to use Lynx to convert the entries from HTML back to text, and ... it looks horrible. Now that the Gemini protocol [5] has stabilize, I've decided I should convert the HTML to text myself, and because I decided back in 2003 to close every tag, it's easy to do (after spending an evening cleaning up a few entries here and there---there are over 1,000 entries pre-2003 that need extensive cleanup though---sigh).

The optional tags make it easier to write, but make it far harder to mechanically process later if need be.

[1] http://boston.conman.org/

[2] It's been only the past year or so that I've created my own markup language [3] to render the HTML, and it's the resulting HTML that I store.

[3] A mostly-up-to-date sample of what it looks like: https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/blob/master/NOTES/testmsg And the Lua script that parses it: https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/blob/master/Lua/format.lu... It's still buggy, and there are corner cases I know how to avoid, and I'm not recommending it to anyone else, as it works for me.

[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/

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