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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

I think of this as the "appification of websites", we need to stop doing it. We need to move back to SSR and sprinkles of JS on websites.

On the other hand web apps absolutely can play a little more with the UX if it provides value to the user. But if it's in the browser, some of this really do still apply. I'm all in on web apps, its a universally accessible platform for development outside the walled gardens of app stores.

What we need to stop doing is treating every single website as an app!

If you want your page to appear in search results on a search engine, it's not a web app it's a website.

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I really wish we could have browser “Accept: text/markdown” for raw documents, but that boat sailed the moment we got CSS.

Why though? We could have the browser apply the styles. And even allow user preferences to affect the presentation! kinda like firefox "article mode".

But that text/markdown would have to be restricted not to include any html tags, which are allowed in the "common" md spec.

Article mode isn't perfect and not compatible with non-articles. Markdown forces content to be just content.

> would have to be restricted not to include any html tags

The point of this would be to deliver pure content, so "any tag" would definitely not be allowed. My user agent would decide what to render and how.

gemtext ?

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi

> But that text/markdown would have to be restricted not to include any html tags, which are allowed in the "common" md spec.

Forbidding them is a one-line change to the spec.

It really annoys me that people keep bringing this up, as if they can't imagine "markdown with html disallowed".

If Gemini had picked markdown instead of gemtext I would've jumped in with both feet.

I get it though -- they're trying to resurrect gopher, which is what gemtext is a modernification of.

Still, I think markdown is our best shot at recovering the real web.

And yes, I know there's a standardization problem. Just pick a standard and run with it. Difficulty picking one is not a reason to pick none. And in case it wasn't obvious I'm talking about markdown without embedded html here.

You might like this commentary: https://notan.app/

> We need to move back to SSR and sprinkles of JS on websites.

Fortunately with stuff like React Server Components, looks like we are moving back to sprinkling JS for websites, which I'm a big fan of.

Is using some form of React for web development mandatory now?

Why would it be mandatory?

It was a sarcasm.

Not sure what was sarcastic about it...

On the other hand a good webapp can also be a website. Just matter of spending enough time on it.

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