Markdown as an Anti-Bloat Manifesto: The Joy of Plain Text

A dispatch on this site is a text file. Not a row in a database, not a JSON blob behind an API, not a component tree waiting to hydrate. A file, with a name, on a disk, that you can open in ed if the mood takes you. This is not nostalgia. It is a position on permanence.

The forty-line argument

Here is the whole build system for a site like this one, minus the typography:

for f in content/**/*.md; do
  out="public/${f#content/}"; out="${out%.md}/index.html"
  mkdir -p "$(dirname "$out")"
  { cat layouts/head.html; pandoc "$f"; cat layouts/foot.html; } > "$out"
done

We use Hugo because it does the same thing in eighty milliseconds and handles the RSS. But the point stands: if Hugo disappears tomorrow, the archive is still legible, still buildable, still ours. Try saying that about a headless CMS.

What bloat costs

A megabyte of JavaScript is not free. It costs a reader on a ten-year-old phone twelve seconds. It costs a reader on a metered connection real money. It costs everyone the ability to read the piece in Lynx, or print it, or save it, or quote it without a screenshot. Every tracker is a tax on attention levied without a vote.

The underground press printed on the cheapest stock available, and the words survived because the words were the product. Markdown is 70gsm newsprint for the network. We are printing on it.

The joy of plain text

Plain text diffs. Plain text greps. Plain text opens in 2046. A Markdown essay can be emailed, pasted, piped, versioned, and read aloud by a screen reader without a single dependency being resolved. The carriage return is the only runtime it requires.

Text was born free; yet everywhere it is in JavaScript chains. Cut them.¹