Why web browsers don't support Markdown 22 ▲ unstory 59 days ago · Tech · hide · 3 comments Web browsers are not document viewers. They are customer acquisition channels for massive tech ecosystems. They don't serve users, but corporations. AI features, VPNs, crypto wallets, and countless of other nonsense. Markdown, on the other hand, is a public good. It would empower writers to publish their words independently. It would strip out countless CMS systems, frameworks, trackers, and ads. All those things where the money sits. Markdown is practically anti-platform. It's simple. Why implement simple Markdown when there is already a bloated PDF viewer and you can play AAA games in a tab, or generate images in some chat window? Markdown is an alien in that world. Not supporting Markdown in a web browser is a choice. That choice tells you exactly who the modern web is built for. Log in to reply on the Fediverse. Comments will appear here. Blisterexe @Blisterexe@fosstodon.org 59 days ago [-] Seems a bit of a silly blog post, browsers don't support markdown because they're meant to render HTML, which is also a markup language, there's no sense in supporting markdown because it's so easy to convert it into HTML, as opposed to, like, json Ariel CG @arielcg@mastodon.social 55 days ago [-] @bubbles but browsers do render JSON into HTML to display it (open https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users and check your devtools), it's not like it just renders it as actual plain text. The same for HTML, some formatting does happen even if it's a really basic one.One could argue the same could be done for Markdown, perhaps something as "basic" as transforming the main elements (headers, bold, italic, strikethrough, quotes and lists) and render those as HTML wihtout CSS. Not even links or images. @gurupanguji @gurupanguji@mastodon.social 57 days ago [-] Not everything is a conspiracy. Browsers render HTML which is what markdown converts to. And there's no standardized markdown because it cannot qualify as a language. Famously, "it's a set of conventions." according to its creator: Gruber.
