💡 RFC | Save post content as markdown in Gaia about sigle

[dantrevino]

I should add if you find out any information that would affect document collections, please add it in the forum: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/proposal-create-a-document-collection-for-cross-app-data-sharing/9286

[dantrevino]

@pradel I'm not getting the user involved at all... I just convert during load from gaia, if required.

[whoabuddy]

I think this is a great idea! Markdown is very easy to read, a widely adopted standard, and would make the back-end data more portable. Looking at the comparison of the two, markdown is much simpler while achieving the same goals for format and rendering.

For one of my projects I am currently using Hugo and Forestry, which stores data in markdown format inside of a git repo. I believe they use commonmark and some (if not all) of the code is open source.

I see markdown meeting all of the requirements listed as long as the inclusion of raw HTML is blocked (as mentioned), and the extensibility can come from implementations in the app, e.g. options to insert a table, toc, or similar. Tagging #87 and #100 as related issues/ideas.

To the comment on the editor / front-end experience, one of my challenges as a writer is that I've become so used to using markdown that I end up writing out my posts, thoughts, and ideas in that format - then have to format it again to post on Sigle. It can get a bit tedious. I tend to use the preview function in my text editor then copy and paste small portions at a time, followed by formatting the titles, links, etc, using the slate.js editor.

[pradel]

I see markdown meeting all of the requirements listed as long as the inclusion of raw HTML is blocked (as mentioned), and the extensibility can come from implementations in the app, e.g. options to insert a table, toc, or similar. Tagging #87 and #100 as related issues/ideas.

@whoabuddy To explain a bit more my concern with this, if we take for example a simple link it can be done that way:

[link](url)

But now let say I want to let the user choose if the link should open in a new tab (using target _blank). I could use some kind of plugins to add data attributes to the markdown, but then I am breaking the standard.

[link](url){:target="_blank"}

Another option is to convert it to html

<a href="http://example.com/" target="_blank">Hello, world!</a>

To make it more secure, I could only allow some tags in the link HTML element and accept only text inside the tag. But this looks like a workaround to fix a simple problem. I like the plugin approach as it can be applied to any tag and you don't switch to HTML. But at the same time if you just copy paste the markdown content from your Gaia storage to another markdown editor, the plugin format will not work.

To the comment on the editor / front-end experience, one of my challenges as a writer is that I've become so used to using markdown that I end up writing out my posts, thoughts, and ideas in that format - then have to format it again to post on Sigle. It can get a bit tedious. I tend to use the preview function in my text editor then copy and paste small portions at a time, followed by formatting the titles, links, etc, using the slate.js editor.

This would definitely be improved by this proposal. Just copy-pasting some markdown content would be easily converted by the editor.

[pradel]

For example, this package looks really cool https://github.com/arve0/markdown-it-attrs and would allow us to solve a lot this customisation problem that markdown is bringing.

But at the same time, HTML would work on other markdown editors too.

[dantrevino]

I faced this as well, with NoteRiot. Originally I was encoding some framework-specific colors into notes, and have left migration code in place for a long while now.

Regarding actual content, NoteRiot saves content as markdown currently (using tui/markdown-it), but we're actually trying to go the other direction because of Markdown's limitations. I'm currently playing with saving content in HTML (sanitized) in current daily builds.

[pradel]

@dantrevino looks like I am not the only one, good to know :D

Did you create some kind of UI migration to migrate all the content of the logged-in user, or do you apply the new format only to the new / updated objects?

[pradel]

Adding a file listing markdown specs I was not aware of before.

markdown_comparison.pdf