alt Hacker NewsStill seems overkill. It's just headers, lists, block quotes, codeblocks, and a few inner emphasis and link formatters, basically. HTML is the whole jungle for a gorilla with a few bananas here.
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It's still going to be faster than creating and moving around a bunch of NSViews simply because the WebView (native WebView, not Electron) renders the entire content at once, directly on the graphics pipeline, skipping all layout and compositor steps that get done on normal NS(Text)Views.
The key point here is to use the WebView only for the text view. Where it goes wrong is when people start writing entire interactive UIs in the WebView.
The other option would be PDFKit, but most people aren't nearly as comfortable programming with PDF as they are with HTML.
> It's just headers, lists, block quotes, codeblocks, and a few inner emphasis and link formatters, basically
That, and in-line HTML. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html:
“For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags.
The only restrictions are that block-level HTML elements — e.g. <div>, <table>, <pre>, <p>, etc. — must be separated from surrounding content by blank lines, and the start and end tags of the block should not be indented with tabs or spaces. Markdown is smart enough not to add extra (unwanted) <p> tags around HTML block-level tags.”
Because of that, I think I would use a html renderer to render markdown. Because people allowing arbitrary HTML opens a huge can of worms I might also whitelist a restricted set of HTML.