Content-Type: text/markdown

Posted Aug 10, 2017 16:48 UTC (Thu) by dbaker (guest, #89236)
In reply to: Content-Type: text/markdown by dkg
Parent article: The coming WebKitGTK+ 2.4 apocalypse

I'm one of the alot devs (https://github.com/pazz/alot, which is a frontend for notmuch) we've talked about using markdown to generate HTML messages, but I really like the idea of using markdown as an interchange format instead. It's much richer than plain text, but without the insanity that HTML brings.

I think that using CommonMark would be a good way to go, it's already spec'ed and it's what github uses, which makes it pretty ubiquitous.

If alot and notmuch-emacs both supported the same flavor of markdown and could communicate with each other that way it would be a good start.

Content-Type: text/markdown

Posted Aug 10, 2017 16:54 UTC (Thu) by skx (subscriber, #14652) [Link] (3 responses)

Sounds like a plan is coming together! I'm not sure how much coordination is required, but it might be worth moving the discussion elsewhere.

I guess I'm thinking of two-things:

* Incoming messages of text/markdown will be rendered as markdown, whether via an export to HTML and a dumping via Lynx, Links, w3m, or similar. (Depends on console vs. GUI a lot. Obviously the user should select their preference, as they might already do now to prefer text/plain to text/html, or vice-versa.)

* Outgoing messages can be sent as multi-part/mixed with both text/plain and text/markdown

There might be fiddly details to be made, but those two core things seem like they should be non-controversial. I'd agree CommonMark is probably the way to go right now, standards are good :)

Content-Type: text/markdown

Posted Aug 11, 2017 0:23 UTC (Fri) by dbaker (guest, #89236) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe multipart/alternative instead of multipart/mixed? That would allow the sender to generate a plaintext or html alternative to the markdown for clients that don't know about text/markdown.

Content-Type: text/markdown

Posted Aug 11, 2017 4:29 UTC (Fri) by dkg (subscriber, #55359) [Link]

i agree it should be multipart/alternative, not multipart/mixed

If no one has a preference for another place to take the discussion, i recommend the notmuch mailing list since that should already be a decent place for discussing alot and notmuch-emacs.

Content-Type: text/markdown

Posted Aug 11, 2017 10:28 UTC (Fri) by felix.s (guest, #104710) [Link]

Wasn't Markdown intended to be directly human-readable? And doesn't the definition of text/* encourage implementations to fall back to direct displaying? Why bother with the multipart/* nonsense?