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Comment by MJR | Hacker News Reader

As a developer you may not want it - but my friends who are copywriters, editors and content strategists will LOVE this. A simple way to grab existing web content as markdown, which many are already using to write and edit their content.

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The problem (at least for me on FF18/Win7) is that you can't just copy/paste the converted markdown, since it is just a display trick, not actual parsed and generated raw text.

Same with FF18 on other platforms. (Iceweasel 18 on Parabola)

Exactly.

I had made a converter that used XSLT and produced actual selectable and copy-able (?) markdown text; didn't gain much traction; I'll post it again to see if anyone's interested.

Here is my version of a Markdown converter:

http://markitdown.medusis.com/

Converts any rich text to Markdown (vanilla Markdown, but selectable).

But this doesn't convert HTML to Markdown (there's already pandoc for that), it displays it as if it were Markdown. It's a clever example of what you can do with CSS, as well as perhaps poking fun at the current popularity of systems like Markdown which artificially restrict us to the IO capabilities of 70s VTs.

Here's another way to convert HTML to Markdown: http://www.lowerelement.com/Geekery/XML/XHTML-to-Markdown.ht...

XHTML, your 90s are calling…

Interesting - I made the assumption that what I saw could be copied. Thanks for the pandoc reference. I wasn't aware of that.

i already posted this lower in the thread, but try http://leeoniya.github.com/reMarked.js/

That makes more sense to me now. Thinking about it I see it being useful to help with some currently painful tasks like converting old wiki content that has a non-standard wiki markup syntax (or no markup at all) into markdown.

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