Building a personal internet from Markdown files

There's some weirdness around android browsers refusing to load html from the phone itself on security grounds. The OP uses a "progressive web app" which seems to be the proper way to do this at some point in the past, but firefox has killed that for some reason. Thus the most difficult part of the project seems to be persuading my phone to render html without copying the files to some server (or running a fileserver on the phone itself, to look at from the phone, which seems absurd).

What I can offer for people stumbling down the same path:

- Obsidian works fine as for ad hoc authoring of markdown while walking around

- It is known on stack overflow that markdown can't be sanely parsed into an AST

- That knowledge is kind of a branding misfire, the 'markdown' one is looking for is here https://github.com/commonmark/cmark

- That cmark binary + some foreach-file style script will turn markdown into html or xml. If you choose makefile and put spaces in the name of files you'll have a moderately bad few minutes cursing your tools

- Given that output xml/html, you can build whatever other html you see fit. I'm doing that with xslt but people are telling me not to

- That html can be written back to the obsidian vault and opened by a phone browser (at least if it's a single file)

- Obsidian doesn't really do headless, but leaving it running on one machine which repeatedly calls "make" to write the *.html files back into the vault works fine

- CSS thus far appears to be required, I was really hoping to annotate the html instead

First 90% done here, second 90% to go.

Isn't your repository at https://github.com/rafic20/folderbase missing the PHP file? Or am I looking at the wrong place?

> In the 1980s, the home computer industry was so new that most computers came with a programming environment that was easily accessible to the end-user. There was so little software out there, users were expected to build their own little programs.

There is a piece of that sentiment that is probably valid, but come on. Python is pre installed basically everywhere now. On a Mac? You get Python and PHP. On any machine, the world is so interconnected that you can get the language of your choice in seconds.

Maybe it is easier to find software now that so much of it has been written, but getting access to a compiler that suits your needs/styles/whatever is comically easier.

You aren’t limited to vendor specific Basic, or paying out the nose for something like Borland C