Le 18/01/2026 à 03:55, Sy a écrit :
> On 2026-01-17 05:46, Didier Kryn wrote:
>
>>     I thought Markdown, on the contrary, was about lightweight. I
>> wonder how it is possible for a markdown document to refer to so many
>> external files to display. I even thought it was designed to not need
>> graphics capability to display. It seems it has been corrupted, only
>> keeping simple the formatting syntax.
>
> You misunderstand the point of a lightweight markup language.  The
> general philosophy behind them all is to provide a minimum
> "reasonable" feature set which can be reduced to a format which is
> feature-obvious and easy on the eyes, where reasonable is determine
> separately by each.  It's a response to how HTML is kind of silly and
> ugly for basic communication.
>
> bold/strong, emphasis/italics, ordered/unordered lists, table, etc.
> are common.  Two features exist in Markdown which are your complaint: 
> Image references and recognizing (at least some) HTML and passing its
> interpretation to the display.
>
> For the bash/shell bibles, they just take advantage of files being
> easy to point to, leaving the renderer (in this case GitHub) to build
> HTML which embeds images for your web browser.
>
> It's wholly optional.  When I write in text files, I use Markdown for
> coloured syntax highlighting in my text editor.  I drop some things
> into a spreadsheet as Markdown even though spreadsheet cannot
> understand the syntax; the plain text "formatting" still works well
> unrendered.
>
> This looks good to me in a spreadsheet:
>
> - A list _with some italics_.
>
> I suppose one would say if you don't like embedded images or other
> features, don't use them.  If your renderer doesn't understand images
> (e.g. an offline web browser, or if you didn't clone the repo to get
> the images) then it'll do whatever it chooses to; maybe display
> nothing at all or a placeholder image.
>
> Notably all wikis are empowered by a limited markup language (e.g.
> Wikipedia uses "Wikitext") because HTML editing is kind of like asking
> everyone to style their Perl code the same.  There's still a balance
> between simplicity and features though, and your observation is that
> Markdown is referencing and rendering images in non-textfile ways;
> fair point, but a powerful (optional) tool.

    You're right. I missed the point, which is about the simplicity of
writing and the simplicity of securing by the web sites, not the
simplicity of usage. Concerning the external images, I used to link many
ones when I was an HTML beginner. I know that wget can get them together
with the file which references them.

    But for the HTML documents I produce *now*, I always make the
effort to fit it all into one single file, with all necessary images
embeded. I understand it is often impossible, or only difficult, with
markdown. I personnaly restrict the usage of markdown to where it is
mandatory, that is README.md to briefly describe a package, not as a
whole package in itself.

    There are documents which are valuable and rich enough like the one
we were talking of, which deserve to be stored locally to consult now
and then, like man pages, not depending of the status of the server and
the connection.

--     Didier