This is the way.
Almost completely pure way of storing ideas. With this I mean that you don’t store unnecessary data such as “background should be white” or “left page margin is 1.3cm”. It’s just text. What’s important is what it says + minimal markup.
Presentation is left to the reader’s client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that’s client’s choice and not part of the document.
I wish browsers would support markdown out of the box, so you could open https://example.com/some-post.md
It’s a simple and elegant way of covering 95% of document structuring needs, while being as close to readable plaintext as possible.
The vast majority of documents currently written in MS-word could just be markdown. The vast majority of web content could just be markdown. This would save the modern world petabytes of XML bloat.
If you need something fancier, either use a vector format or do fancy client-side styling.
Old fart warning!
Presentation is left to the reader’s client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that’s client’s choice and not part of the document.
I remember when that is how the web worked. All that markup was to define the structure of the document and the client rendered it as set by the user.
Some clients were better than others. My favourite was the default browser in OS/2 Warp, which allowed me to easily set the display characteristics of every tag. The end result was that every site looked (approximately) the same, which made browsing so much nicer, in my opinion.
Then someone decided that website creation should be part of the desktop publishing class (at least at the school I taught at). The world (wide web) has never recovered.
We’re kinda getting it back with the Accessibility tree
In theory, if the page is compiled right, you can read everything right from there. You could also interact with it.
Thanks. This is the first I’ve heard of the Accessibility tree. A quick look kind of spooked me, but I’ll dig deeper.
