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Comment by quelsolaar | Hacker News Reader

Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. The web is full of great content being made hard to access because of poor/inflexible layout choices. Just give me the text and let me choose how to make it readable. The added fact that you can read raw markdown without even parsing it makes it even better. Not having total control over what its going to look like for the reader is a feature not a bug.

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> Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good.

God, remember when that was that goal of HTML and the web?

What a beautiful couple of years that was.

IMHO still is. Just don't add any JS or CSS

Problem with that is that the default browser styling is extremely ugly and the ability for custom style sheets was removed from the browser GUI many years ago. ReaderMode and Addons can help, but as long as the default is essentially broken and unsupported that whole approach remains a dead end.

On top of that come issues like the lack of pagination support in browsers, which make long document impossible to read and practically require to add custom UI inside the website itself.

ePub works much better, with readers giving control over line spacing, font size, pagination and proper markup for TOC and other metadata, but despite ePub being based on xHTML, browsers have ignored it (only old Edge supported it for a little while).

No? That has always been a uniquely unreadable language with weird, arbitrary choices.

And on no planet is it human readable without parsing.

On this planet, humans have read HTML without parsing for years. People building their first websites without any significant technical knowledge stole HTML by reading the source of other sites and edited it by hand.

Oh, please. Don't insult everyone here by pretending you actually believe HTML is a human readable format like markdown. It was never designed for that and has never claimed that.

What a rediculous thing to even say.

It is. Humans do read it, and have read it. Like any language it's just a matter of familiarity.

HTML was designed for humans to read and write long before Claude or compiling everything from typescript or whatever, when websites were all written by hand. In text editors. Even if you were using PHP and templates or CGI you wrote that shit by hand, which meant you had to be able to read it and understand it. Even if you were using Dreamweaver, you had to know how to read and write HTML at some point. WYSIWYG only gets you so far.

Is HTML more difficult to read than Markdown? Sure. It is impossible? Not even remotely. Teenagers did it putting together their Geocities websites.

You can be as snarky as you like, but facts are facts.

I'm confused. Are you saying you cannot read an HTML file?

You must be kidding. If you can read BBCode you can read HTML.

That is an unjustified over-generalisation.

HTML markup is pretty readable (except when it becomes soup) and I read and write raw HTML documents all the time. I like it better than markdown.

It's even more readable in a code editor that distiguishes tags from content.

Ask your grandmother to do the same.

They're dead for more than 20 years.

Both of them.

I don't think they were appreciating that HTML could be read unrendered. I think they meant that it was up to the browser to render HTML with sensible but unspecified or otherwise user-specified styling (the browser is supposed to be a "user agent", remember?) before web designers started aiming for pixel-perfect control through CSS.

> Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good.

You know, like when you write <h2> in HTML or \section{} in LaTeX?

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