this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (6 children)

Ye, some of these i started thinking of after i made my comment, which is my bad. Its true a project that uses the full github stack is harder to move, its its still relatively easy. The only problem you'd have is redirecting traffic to a new host, but this problem exists in all platforms and not only in project management sites like github.
As for your bulletpoints, i have a few remarks. Mainly that github pages are silly and they should not be used as a website. And even if you are, there are tools out there to convert the markdown from github pages into html/css/js so moving that is easy. Same with wiki pages, they are just markdown. 90% of markdown is compatible with other sites, and the parts that arent probably have a site specific syntax that youll need to look up, nothing bad. Review comments i will disregard, as those are part of the PR process. Once a project is moved you could hide the PR tab on github or close all new ones redirecting them to the new host. All older ones can be handled and phased out. Once a pr is merged, get the commit from github and push it to the new host. Thanks git!
Random contributers have nothing to say imo. If a project's team feels the need to move away from github a true contributer/side team member/helper will move with them, and if they dont then so be it. Once a project team feels the need to move, something bad must be going on and moving will always be the better move for their mental health than to keep working with bad stuff.
As mentioned before ci/release pipelines are all yaml. Their odeas stay the same, only action names & their patameters change. Nothing complex there to move there...

So im short : only moving your traffic is a real problem, but is a problem on all websites and all communities, not just github or a project on github

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Small aside: Microsoft GitHub’s proprietary Markdown fork is certainly not 90% compatible—most egregious IMO was overloading blockquote semantics with callouts which breaks semantics all over the web. Some providers & forks have had to support their fork due to the monopoly control MS GitHub asserts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Do you mean admonitions? E.g. info, warning, etc? There's precedent for that in commonly-used open source implementations, e.g. obsidian.md (which uses the same syntax, and started before). What semantics does it break? It's designed to read well in plaintext and render nicely even if used in a renderer that doesn't support admonitions, e.g.

[!NOTE] Information the user should notice even if skimming.

As opposed to other common markdownish implementations that use nonsensical plaintext which renders poorly in alternative renderers. Here's a discussion on the topic in the CommonMark forums.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Read the Markdown spec where it says the > denotes a blockquote. There isn’t room to overload it without breaking that into something not backwards compatible (such as CommonmsMark which will follow the spec & render a blockquote—which, according to the HTML spec, must be text quoting a source). Just because some of the bigger players—namely the proprietary forks, Obsidian & MS GitHub—doesn’t mean it’s not breaking with the original spec. Go ahead & do it, but don’t lie & say it is Markdown or Markdown-compatible. Instead these entities try to push & sway everyone to adopt their syntax rather than working with say CommonMark with RFCs.

CommonMark has the ::: block syntax, but folks using this are relying on stringly-typed, not-well-defined options when they do ::: note as it just becomes a CSS class where anyone could style it.

As callouts are such an everpresent construct in technical writing, documentation, & so on, what you need is first-class support. Docbook as an output has first-class support, but sadly W3 shot down the last attempt at an element proposal (but can be properly by manually constructed with role=note & aria-labelledby). reStructuredText & AsciiDoc are both lightweight markup syntaxes that support first-class callouts & other elements (definition lists, summary/details, figures, etc.) as well as having first-class metadata (like basically every other creative work format for images, audio, documents).

All of this is to say what Microsoft is doing is no longer Markdown & only they hold the keys to the spec (you can complain in their forums, but you can’t submit an RFC or pull request). But also, Markdown / CommonMark are honestly ill-suited for the task of technical writing since it doesn’t support basic features for that task (embedding HTML defeats the purpose & portability)—and instead we have a lot of ad-hoc hacks & bad HTML output due to choosing the wrong tool for the job.

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