The Markdown Web

The ’Web is shit.
Apps are a terrible replacement;

Want to install — and sign in to — an app every time somebody wants to share something with you from a different service? Want to install a different app for literally every interaction with every different company? Have you even got the drive space for that? The bandwidth?

An app is just a name for a webpage that’s been skinned with enough IP that will allow Apple or Google to send you to prison .. if you mod it.

An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification - Cory Doctorow

The ’Web can only be improved by adding to it;
More features, more JavaScript, more CSS!
No proposal to remove complexity will survive

You cannot replace the ’Web;
Every Grand Scheme to Reinvent The ’Web just creates unpaid work for developers to boost another company’s profile.

We must hijack the ’Web.

Use what already exists.
Sidestep the bullshit.

A Modest Proposal

Serve Markdown documents directly to users.

No JavaScript. A document-based ’Web,
not an inscrutable monolithic web-app.

No CSS. The reader decides how it should look.

Say No to HTML!

If you allow web-markdown to include chunks of HTML, and this thing actually takes off, then Google et al. will just wrap a ton of HTML in the mearest amount of web-markdown to get it to render and we will be back to square one.

Browser extensions already exist to render Markdown files (Firefox, Chrome &c.)! Slight adaptaion might be needed to make them work as their own browsing mode, but otherwise the tools to do this already exist. Use Google’s browser against Google.

Without HTML, JS & CSS we allow for all new web-markdown browsers to be made that don’t need an impossible-to-recreate-from-scratch monsterous rendering engine bolted to it! Browsers for low end hardware, old computers, anything new that can be imagined rather than only what can be imagined that can run Chrome.

Two Things Must Happen

1. Authors to provide sites in web-markdown form, with an alternate home page (i.e. “index.wmd”). I don’t even like Markdown, but a lot of ’Web content is already written in Markdown before being converted to HTML, so it’s best to just use what already exists and not to create work where it isn’t needed

2. A standards round-table to find the baseline markdown features and to create new ones to replace chunks of HTML, particularly input forms.

   Do this anywhere, but please include me kroc@camendesign.com.
   I've created a channel on Discord, maybe this can be a starting point.
   If you don’t like that, propose something better.