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Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

Not quite a social network but a new version of the web where documents are just markdown or something very similar and the browser is an unglorified document reader with no JavaScript has been on my mind for a while.

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Sounds interesting. Let’s call the markup language “Hypertext Markup Language”, and we’ll make it XML-like versus Markdown-like so we have at least have a well-designed spec to work with. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll work well enough.

And let’s support JavaScript, but you can turn it off if you’d like.

As someone that runs a platform for people to get to edit and control the HTML of their content I extra appreciate the snarkiness, but the point is to use a format humans can more easily/cleanly edit, and focus on document oriented display of data where the browser/reader decides/controls styling vs the platform and you don't have to fight back against a trustless code execution engine trying to attack you while you read a news article.

It would be a pleasant and interesting contrast to the giant anti-user Rube Goldberg machine browsers have turned into (err actually just two browsers both funded by the same company because the nightmareish complexity makes it impossible to do competing browser implementations).

Feel free to call my idea stupid (it is) but let's not pretend HTML and the current implementation of the web is some sort of perfect ultimate gold standard we can't improve upon.

What distinguishing feature would it have to something like Gopher or Gemini[0]?

[0] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

I'm building a SaaS website similar to this. Unfortunately, we all like shiny things.

Gopher called

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