Hacker News Reader

Comment by yoz-y | Hacker News Reader

> A large part of HTML, and a large part of modern browsers and other web technologies, are focused on ensuring that the publisher has control over the user's experience.

It's also the reason why it caught on. On one hand people reject the ability to express individuality on the web, on the other a similar crowd is nostalgic about geocities and praises similar revivals. It's either one or the other.

> I would really like to see structured text that is self-descriptive (e.g. this is the document title, this is a paragraph, this is a header, bullet list, etc.) but have no ability to influence HOW those things are displayed- eventually maybe we'll have browsers that can support rich theming, etc.

How about publishing markdown over HTTPS? Then make a client that renders just that?

View on HN

Why's it either one or the other? You could have one browser application for no-nonsense textual or informational pages and one for wacky personal geocities/myspace style pages. Feel free to enjoy both, either separately, or if you want more integration you're free to use the underlying OS shell to switch between them, read them side-by-side, link between them, etc.

> You could have one browser application for no-nonsense textual or informational pages and one for wacky personal geocities/myspace style pages.

Hence the idea of a separate markdown only browser. I don’t think http is the problem here. So it would be better to reuse as much existing tech as possible.

Note: Personally I don’t think it would catch on, the convenience of handling everything in one program is just too high.

> On one hand people reject the ability to express individuality on the web, on the other a similar crowd is nostalgic about geocities and praises similar revivals.

I like to think about books as of an example where content is way more important than presentation. Most of the web sites these days spend a lot more effort on how you present it than what, in the end a 1000 thousand words article now has a very complex architecture behind it, hundreds or thousands of time more than the content.

You can do that with gemini. It will serve whatever MIME type, and you could have a server that serves markdown files.

For that matter you can serve images or whatever binary files as individual requests (that is, not inline with another repsonse).

I've been playing with it and I rather like it.

as an early gemini convert this is one of the reasons I wish solderpunk would split the gemini protocol and text/gemini mimetype specs. gemini can serve more than text/gemini (e.g. markdown as you suggest), so embedding the text/gemini mimetype into the protocol spec seems rather like embedding the html spec into the http one

I agree in part, and disagree in part. I like that gemini has a "native" markup format, and that its simple and bare-bones as it is. It's a communications baseline, and other things are negotiable between client and browser?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com