Switching to Markdown

Back in 2014, I wrote custom Markdown-like language. At the time I did so because I needed features like math equations that weren’t super standardized back then. Now, I’ve finally decided to admit defeat and just switch to Markdown. I’m still using my custom static site generator, dllup-rs, but I no longer have to worry about maintaining my own parser and stuff.

The advantages of using Markdown are many:

• AI agents can read it natively
• built-in syntax highlighting in most text editors
• no need to maintain my horrible vibe-coded parser and AST

But I’m keeping my static site generator, which has:

• images using <figure> and special handling for my high resolution photography nerd use case, like showing EXIF data and downloading in various sizes including the 100 megapixel original
• serverside KaTeX and precomputed image dimensions since I really really hate my website jumping around during loading
• various extensions that even highly extended Markdown variants don’t have, like my custom “big button” and citations/references

The downside of course is that it is kinda cool that back as a student I hand-wrote some really concise Python for my personal markup language and static site generator. Now, with my vibe-coded static site generator and a generic markup language, perhaps a little bit of the personality and “nerd cred” are gone. But it runs a lot faster and has way more features as described in “amazing website improvements”. At least all my blog posts are hand written and my CSS styles are mostly hand designed.