Hacker News Reader

Comment by worldsavior | Hacker News Reader

Is using a web browser really necessary for viewing Markdown? Seems a really inefficient way to view a what's supposed to be a small and minimal language.

View on HN

Emphasis on "Github flavored", which supports additional extensions to the markdown spec that a TUI can't properly preview. You need some kind of GUI (preferably a browser since it does support some html) in order to properly preview it.

Yes, exactly. For example Mermaid diagrams (that is supported in this project) can't be rendered in TUI (well, technically you can if you use something like Kitty's image protocol, but I think this is being pendant).

Using a GUI framework over a web browser is still much more efficient.

As someone said already, Markdown was designed to be compiled to HTML, and browsers are the best HTML renderers we have. While you can technically interpret it semantically and render it without a browser, you would still need to support HTML since Markdown supports embedded HTML (e.g. `<details>` tag is a popular one to hide information). At that point you probably are better off using a browser anyway.

By the way, while browsers can be both CPU and memory hogs, they're not inherently inneficient and it mostly depends on what the website is doing. This project uses minimal JavaScript and no frameworks, and while I didn't measure it I assume this site should be reasonably efficient, both in memory and CPU usage.

Markdown was designed to compile to HTML and web browsers are designed to render HTML. So I’d say a browser is the only reasonable choice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com