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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

Aren’t all webpages handmade to one extent or another? Or are these webpages that don’t use frameworks like React and Angular?

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I don't think "handmade" should be taken to literally, but rather be attached the meaning as described below.

In my experience there tends to be a strong correlation between a website being hand-written and the quality of the content on the website.

My hypothesis is that it somehow hits the sweetspot between:

- creating your own SSG and only writing mundane blogposts about how you wrote that SSG (am guilty of this)

- and pumping out raw thoughts on Twitter/Wordpress/Medium/Substack etc.

I think that is at least part of what this website is trying to capture.

adjective: hand-written written with a pen, pencil, or other handheld implement.

...?

All websites are the result of a human pushing power through a cpu and sending low voltage signals to it via a keyboard, so in a way all are handmade. That's why so many are wondering what qualifies as handmaid to this site's author - site builders like Wix-created sites probably don't count but do SSGs count? What about using _any_ css framework?

Tho it's hard to define, it's pretty easy to distinguish.

I think this could be said about much of reality.

adjective: hand-written written with a pen, pencil, or other handheld implement.

Lately I've been writing my personal web pages on my TRS-80 Model 100. I can hold that in my hands.

In my experience, markdown doesn't offer much advantage over HTML, as writing a few short tags isn't much of a burden. (Even more so, if you use the old-style `b` and `i` phrase elements, which are apparently considered ok again. Personally, I still use `strong`, etc, which may be the most annoying feature for hand-written HTML. But this can be fixed by an editor shortcut.) Otherwise, a bit of server-side scripting for adding headers and footers and providing navigation is fine, but probably already outside the specs of "entirely handmade".

For me the difference between writing markdown and writing HTML directly is that if I use the latter, I won't actually write the darn article. HTML is pretty bad for re-reading and editing, as the tags get in the way.

I find the opposite. I almost never use Markdown unless forced to.

I find it much easier to remember

    <a href="https://foo.com"><img src="foo.jpg" width="300" alt="foo"></a>

that some

    [foo(foo.jpg)]

or is it

    (http://foo.com)[(foo.jpg)(alt=alt text)]

or is it

    [foo.com(foo.jpg) width=300]

or is it

    (foo.com)[foo.jpg](alt text)[::width="300"]

...? I can never remember the goddamn inconsistent syntax.

and is it 2 asterisks for bold, 1 for italic, or 1 and 2, or is it 2 and 3? With html it's

    <b>this is bold</b> <i>this is italic</i>
    <b><i>this is bold and italic</i></b>

Much easier to remember.

Same here.

Same problem for me.

these syntaxes now suffer the same problem that forum software went through... each has their own syntax and they are not usually compatible.

HTML, for better or worse, is the syntax we all know by heart and is universal.

I’ve never seen a markdown flavour with anything other than 1 for italic and 2 for bold. Emphasis and strong emphasis respectively.

I agree that the link to image syntax is easier to remember in html. That said, since markdown supports inline html you can always use that.

Go and use MediaWiki markup, then you won't be able to make that assertion any more. (-:

Hard to remember. <b> and <i> are easier to remember than 1 and 2 (or is it 2 and 1) and now I have to figure out how to escape a damn asterisk, and how to do bold italic. Too much stuff to figure out. HTML is easier.

I just write the article in the code editor, then go back and add the tags.

Seems obvious to me, but maybe because back when I was a journalist, that's how we did it. The tags (how and what varied by system) triggered chryons and video playback and other events.

> HTML is pretty bad for re-reading and editing, as the tags get in the way.

There is https://pugjs.org if you want to write html in a cleaner, concise way.

Eh. That’s just yet another templating engine. What I like about markdown is that I can use an editor (such as iA) with previews, highlighting and style helpers.

Is it similar to HAML? I just started using that at work and really quite like it for templating.

It's sort of a more pythonic HAML with good JS tooling is how I would describe it.

The "strong" and "b" tags don't mean the same thing, nor do the "em" and "i" tags. HTML, used properly, will tell you why the typography appears as it does, which means that the meaning isn't locked up in the typographic conventions of the day (which change, often making old documents confusing to read, and are not accessible). Markdown is lazy.

Technically they don't mean the same thing, but in practical reality, they almost always display the same way, which is what matters to most people.

They might display the same way, but they shouldn't read the same way, which matters a lot to users of screen readers.

"handmade" in this context usually refers to writing the raw HTML yourself; no framework, no nothing.

So using Markdown or something similar disqualifies? Even if i write the HTML template and generator script myself?

It depends. Did you write the scripting language?

If you look at the submission form, he excludes "website builders" which I think would exclude things like Squarespace, Wix, etc. I suppose if one of those builder tools let you use Markdown, that would not qualify, but if you are using Markdown with something like Hugo or Jekyll, that seems legitimately "handmade" to me, but I don't operate that site. :)

What about a handmade template for a CMS?

By the spirit of the thing, Markdown ought not qualify

Handmade in the sense that they don't use frameworks like React or Angular. Just like how technically a box cake mix cake is "homemade" but usually if someone says "homemade cake" they made it from scratch.

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