Camen Design Forum
I'm not against the idea of returning to a more hypermedia style of web, but I think AsciiDoc would be a better human-readable format than Markdown.
(P.S. this post is regarding this blog entry: https://camendesign.com/blog/markdown-web)
And you are 100% correct, but if anything we’re going to get off the ground it would need to require the lowest amount of work for existing content and the lingua franca
A project that you might be interested in that works *somewhat* along the lines of your post is the gemini protocol (geminiprotocol.net). its pretty limited by design, so maybe doesn't fit the requirements. i love this line of thinking though and gemini is, at least, a decent example of a concrete attempt in this direction.
one note about gemini is that its standardized a text format called gemtext that is somewhat analogous to gopher index files. there's no reason why clients couldn't serve markdown though. i believe some clients have first class support for markdown documents too!
i also wanted to say. i lost my old password account, but i've been following your blog for years and years. thanks for being an inspiration to a younger version of myself to get into web and especially thinking deeply about the intersections of web, design, and usability!
Oh! Nice to hear from you again. Sorry I'm no longer on the ball these days, I have a wife and a son to look after now and the 'Web has completely gone off the rails from the web I was trying to build :/
I have spoken of Gemini before (https://mstdn.social/@kroc/110952073856751159) and that it's not a solution for existing web content. I think it's neat, but fundamentally flawed as a document format.
Choosing Markdown is about reusing what already exists to minimise adoption cost; I don't even like Markdown and think there's way better formats, but I have to acknowledge that a ton of web content is already written in Markdown before being converted and sites could begin serving the original files with minimal effort. It's up to browsers to innovate here.
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