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Comment by Spunkie | Hacker News Reader

I've not much to say on the thermal printer part of this but the extensions they did to markdown are great. They had me double taking for a few seconds thinking they might be real markdown because they make so much sense.

    [align=center]    Center-align the following text (also left, right)
    [qr=https://...]  Generate and print a QR code

Deprecating align in html was a mistake.

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It’s funny, after all the work that was done to decouple content from presentation, 90% of the markup I’ve seen in every codebase this decade is using Styled Components anyway, which commingles them in the source code anyway.

Oh man... the popularity of the tailwind css framework. I have big-o Opinions on that, but screw it, if it helps people get things done quickly, then I'm all for it. The semantic xml/html dweebs set us back a solid decade.

Indeed, I can't think of anybody who prefers <button> to <div><div><div><div class="button xl red-border top-pad-2x rounded-corner-in-bottom-left-but-not-other-corners" onclick="javascript:...">

I think this further proves that the hypothesis of decoupling content from presentation is flawed. The question is how many more data points do we need before we admit that?

Yes, iirc the concept wasn't to decouple content and presentation but to decouple semantics from presentation in order to re-present content in different media in that medium's native representation of a particular semantic. However, many things are not much different in different media, a headline is a headline. And other things like "emphasis" can have cultural differences even within the same media, like being bold, italicized or even double-quotes.

I suppose to a limited extent, that being “articles” in the typical sense, the strategy might be said to have some modicum of success. I’m sure many CMSs store articles as mostly “plain” HTML and regurgitate the same, directly into a part of the final HTML document, with actual normal CSS rules styling that.

Since align is only deprecated and not removed, and Markdown is a superset of HTML (at least for CommonMark and GFM), it would be valid markdown to just use <div align=center> to center text (not like there's such a thing as invalid Markdown)

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