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Not really the point of the article, but I've been moving to plain HTML for a while now for certain types of personal documents. It's a great feeling to open a file in the browser and know it's going to work. Make a change and all you have to do is refresh the page. Markdown, org-mode, etc. have good intentions, and they work for super simple documents, but in the end the flexibility of html and its closing tags pays off.


FWIW, I started going this direction and ended up taking one step back and settling on Markdown. The reason was I realized an HTML renderer is still a pretty heavy dependency to consume my content.

The upshot is you can now browse my blog with curl or netcat:

  curl https://apitman.com/txt/feed

  nc apitman.com 2052 <<< /txt/feed
I may switch to another format in the future. It doesn't matter much as long as it's readable as plain text.


I tend to write in Slim, it does an excellent job of removing most of the tag noise from HTML while giving you more flexibility than Markdown.

https://slim-lang.com


Slim doesn't look particularly interesting for majority-plaintext applications.

It doesn't let you add nodes inline, so things like emphasis or links become much more verbose.


Yeah, that's the main weakness. Being able to drop down to markdown from within Slim alleviates the problem to a degree.


You can read simple html as plain text just fine.


Maybe for some definitions of "you"


https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ html is unreadable?


As long as the HTML file is not minified, they're quite readable. <p>It's just plain text with some markup</p>.


Amen. Markdown does unexpected things so often, and then I struggle with how to escape it.




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