alt Hacker NewsI love Markdown. I'm a bit surprised, though, that you still can't open a .md file by default in most web browsers. It seems like it should be quite trivial to have the browser automatically convert it to html and display it.
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As I was griping above, you usually can't just view a Markdown file with formatting applied at all. I think MAYBE Notepad has been updated just recently to render it, but otherwise... you're looking at plain text with a bunch of formatting characters in it. Why? It's baffling. Where are the simple Markdown READERS?
That would require Markdown to be standardized. (There is the CommonMark standard, but it’s extremely complex and still ambiguous.)
This is a good call. I know it's been suggested multiple times over the years; I wonder what the rationale was for rejecting the format, or at least having the option to render a file when it's loaded. (Maybe a "display as HTML" button or the like would be required before it would be rendered.)
Yeah, also missing a built-in JS API for turning Markdown into safe HTML. Sure, there are lots of different implementations, but maybe start with something small at least.
I've taken to using Markdeep [1] for this.
You write your markdown file, but add the code snippet at the bottom of yor document and save it with a .md.html extension. Then when you double-click it it opens and renders in your browser.
I save my notes in a Google Drive, and it's now replaced all the note taking apps I've tried over the years
[1] https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/