Reading Dave Winer’s notes on a hypothetical Markdown web browser. I don’t think we need to reinvent the web or HTML, but it would be neat if web browsers had built-in Markdown preview by default. Why not? Browsers render PDF and all sorts of files.

@manton Kind of feels like a browser extension.

@manton A browser that won’t do things Dave doesn’t like is silly.

@manton I am all in favor of native support for Markdown documents. I am much more wary of direct browser rendering of Markdown files served by a website. Now that I type it, I’m realizing the distinction is subtle, but it’s the idea of people making an end-run around HTML by serving “Markdown pages” that worries me. That snowballs into forking the web.

Why not use the GitHub Markdown API to convert markdown to HTML?

@dave It’s too bad about HTTP. Feels like the tension is between the document-based web and the web as application platform. Nothing wrong with the document-based web!

@ablaze Yeah, I think an end-run like that is a fair concern. HTML is good at what it does and is essential to the web.

@manton Cloudflare now offers web content in markdown format, so perhaps this is a first step https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/markdown-for-agents/

@manton "a small [navigation] extension may be useful”
"we may eventually need a small amount of metadata”

If you can't get through a one-pager without already betraying the simplicity of the idea, there's no way it survives the real world.

I generally like Dave's ideas, but who wants to live in a world where every website looks the same? There's more to the web than black text on a white background.