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by reactspa 1400 days ago
I was under the impression that using markdown to create html webpages was a common use case, and had been solved. Was I wrong?

(I've used markdown for note taking, not for web pages, hence am asking.)

5 comments

Curious if we've ever considered adding Markdown as a new MIME type that could be accepted directly by browsers (similar to text/plain). It could be nice to serve markdown without needing to even use a static-site generator (but still have the server reasonably render the doc, similar to a reader view).
Beaker Browser did this. The first problem about Markdown is: which variant do you support? The second problem is that people already treat it like a markup language with a mandatory post-processing step and will inevitably desire the level of control/precision that can only be achieved by making it more like HTML (or making liberal use of the <html> escape hatch).
I was under the same impression as well. I have been using https://docusaurus.io/ for some time now and I am very happy with it and I am pretty sure there are other tools out there as well.
reminds me of Znai [1]

What sold me on Znai was the integration of code snippets (straight from source files, mining them out of the code) and integration of diagramming from PlantUML, which is done in a way that is compatible with the format used in Gitlab, VSCode and other markdown renderers.

Markdown has turned into a truly amazing ecosystem.

[1] https://testingisdocumenting.org/znai/introduction/what-is-t...

I am hesitant to give it a try. Mostly use sphinx and .rst - docusaurus looks nice but also overengineered.

Is it a lot to set up or is it just markdown all the way and works out of the box?

It only takes a few minutes to set it up. I use it for my blog, very happy with it.
It really looks great. I like your book section - I wonder why we read the same books. HN recommendations maybe; will look into the ones I didn't read. Thanks for sharing
glad to know that.
As far as i know

[1] https://www.mkdocs.org : Markdown to static web page converter

[2] https://rentry.co : Markdown pastebin

[3] https://prose.sh : Markdown blog, upload post via ssh

[4] https://bearblog.dev : Markdown blog, upload post via web-browser

There's just a ton of libraries around it. I've used Markdowndeep in C#. I forget all the ones I tried (at least 3) before I settled on that one.

A colleague just mentioned this to me a few days ago:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

The usual approach is to compile markdown to html either before uploading to server or server side.

My understanding is this renders markdown to html client side using JavaScript

good point. markdown as web content is widely used, but not whole web page. the project is a sample to use markdown as whole page by putting web element (header,ment,theme) in frontmater.