Markdown and mock = textmock | Hacker News Reader

Markdown and mock = textmock

textmock.net

71 pointslgm_29 comments

Nice to see someone else working on tools like this. I think Markdown has a good level of ‘accessibility’ in that the syntax is friendly while fairly capable.

If you’re curious, here’s some of my experiments (best viewed on desktop):

- https://datadown.collected.design/github/RoyalIcing/lofi-boo... - https://lofi.design/syntax/ - http://collected.design/research

Keen to collaborate with people!

hard to tell exactly what you’re doing from mobile but looos interesting and i’ll look more later - here’s mine let’s collaborate http://www.hyperfiddle.net

If you enjoy writing html without the annoying punctuation, you might also like Pug: https://codeburst.io/getting-started-with-pug-template-engin...

Very cool, thanks for the link! I've also seen extensions of Markdown (CommonMark generic directives) that I could use instead of the syntax I made up.

Formerly known as Jade.

I'm glad someone's experimenting with this idea. The makers of CakeMail did something similar with email templates a while back (see http://cakedown.alexandredeschamps.ca/), and I always thought it was a bummer that they didn't keep going with the idea.

This could be a very convenient tool! Is it an open source project? If it is, I can imagine using this to quickly create landing sites or web sites for code projects. No worries if not.

No, it's not OOS, but I'm thinking about it. Why not?

I saw that as a useful to quickly prototype an idea. But I'm not yet sure frankly.

This is smart. If you're not going to do anything else with it, you should publish it.

If/when you do, consider using the ISC license. It is a simple and highly permissive license.

https://choosealicense.com/licenses/isc/

Beware, there's a popup video when you open the page.

Indeed, it's small (88KB) and silent, but I shouldn't do that on mobile. I've just removed it.

For possibly the first time ever, I really liked this one, and it makes great sense why it happens. It showed a clear demo in seconds, and then automatically closed itself to reveal the UI it was just showing.

The demo is so robust I probably wouldn't have figured out the tool's purpose in 10 seconds without the video.

Great idea, but is the TextMock->HTML interpreter open-source for rendering elsewhere?

If the format is only easily usable/previewable on some proprietary site that might go away, people will be reluctant to learn/adopt the format.

I completely agree, I'm thinking about that. I should probably specify the grammar and make my tm->html converter open source. And probably allow to store on a personal git repo so that nobody is afraid to be locked in. So many interesting things to do, and so little time :)

I use the markdown editor http://typora.io/ for a few years now.

It's a downloadable client and for on Windows, Linux & OS X

This is great! I'm not sure if I'm missing it somewhere, but it would be nice to be able to see the resulting HTML without having to view the page source.

Agreed, you are not the first to give this feedback. I'll work on that, it should be available tomorrow.

They typo’ed on the word poopular. Or not. :D

This is cool. I also can't help but notice the objective-c [method message] smalltalk-like syntax.

Using markdown as a sort of templating language, like Haml, is a pretty cool idea.

useless on mobile safari can’t even watch the video or see any of the copy

It's only 88KB, but I should not display the video on mobile indeed. I'm removing it right now.

thanks much better

Neat but what was wrong with HTML again?

> what was wrong with HTML again?

That it's a lot harder to correctly type HTML than it is to express a basic page layout in this new form. In other words, on this view HTML is not source code, it's object code, and should be produced by a program, not by humans. I would agree with that.

That's indeed a valid question. I think it's quite a bit simpler than HTML, albeit not by a huge factor. I think that that makes a difference, as the relative success of Markdown shows. But I agree I might be wrong, we'll see.

It is telling that the generated HTML for the example document ends up being almost 2x the size of the input, in terms of markup overhead the generated HTML is almost 3x worse than this TextMock (by a very crude estimate).

Love this. Would be great to have the converter. Not so much to mockup sites but to generate help docs and blog posts on my bootstrap site.

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