alt Hacker NewsHistory explains why HTML is now a living standard: https://whatwg.org/faq (Ctrl+F Living and keep reading).
> A published version of the standard NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER changes.
WhatWG does have per-commit snapshots of the standard. They're just not semantically versioned because it is a living standard.
I think what the author wants is something like Gemini instead of HTML, but that has its own set of problems. My plea for Dillo would be to instead just support a text/markdown mime-type natively and we can try for adoption in more browsers.
> The objective is not to create a feature-by-feature clone of the Web, but to create an specification that allows humans to exchange knowledge, notes, and other forms of information without the imposed requirement of having to run a full blown VM to read it.
Markdown in browsers fits your objective! Only gotcha is commonmark extensions, and they can work with sub-type declarations in the mimetype.
Replies
We should start from a single, sane specification. That is not a descriptor for the Markdown ecosystem.
> I think what the author wants is something like Gemini instead of HTML, but that has its own set of problems.
Yes and no. I want it to be simpler than HTML (which implies less features) but easy to parse. The problem with Markdown and other "text-like" formats is that they are designed to be written by humans (which is good) but complicates the parsing. I guess is more similar to the device independent format used by groff/troff before layouting.
>My plea for Dillo would be to instead just support a text/markdown mime-type natively and we can try for adoption in more browsers.
Dillo only supports a subset of HTML. Other formats like markdown are converted to HTML with plugins or read as plain text.