Hacker News Reader

Comment by hoosieree | Hacker News Reader

I wonder about the other direction - how much can you remove from Markdown until it's no longer useful enough for wide adoption?

How about:

    one heading level only
    no nesting (of lists or styles)
    tables can only contain plain text (not even links!)
    either indented or fenced code blocks, but not both

But keep the html escape hatch. If anyone needs one of the missing features, they can drop down to html. Just a bit more friction.

View on HN

I recently made a markdown parser that is essentially this. It runs my blog. My table parser is non-standard, though, as I hate typing up markdown tables. Instead, I’m using a special code block “gen:table” and I just type up a whitespace-aligned table.

The raw markdown table ends up looking like a table even with standard markdown processors since it just renders as an unknown code block.

Tables can be very nice to work with in a text editor with some convenience features like automatic alignment and tab-to-next-cell. At least that's my experience using tables in emacs with org-mode files. But I imagine there's quite a lot going on behind the scenes to make that work, plus there's some inflexible syntax used to recognize when your cursor is in a table.

But I like your approach of leveraging monospace fonts to work as informal tables.

gemtext (the native presentation format for gemini capsules) is a markdown-like language which only uses the first three characters of each line to determine the presentation mode for that line. it's designed so that it's trivial to create a renderer, even on retro 8-bit computers (determine presentation mode, set up the font, then just dump the buffer until you hit a newline). it supports paragraphs, headings (3 levels), links (not inline with text, must be on its own line), lists (unordered), blockquotes, and preformatted text. there is zero inline formatting (not even a way to emphasize words in a paragraph).

https://gemini.flounder.online/docs/gemtext.gmi

Amazing, that hits the spot.

Remove img support. Its severely lacking anyways. Most images need more meta data such as sizes, but also modern images are responsive with different resolutions etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com