It seems to me that reaction to this has been tame so far. I believe EFF and phone calls alone aren't going to do anything. You basically need awareness on the level of blackouts.
Are you confident about the current donation model? (I understand/appreciate that it's not a business)
I just want to make sure sites can stay up before I start recommending this to friends' kids.
I'm very confident in the donation/supporter model. Once we stop needing to upgrade our infrastructure, it should grow faster than expenses.
I can be high and mighty about this, but legally Neocities is a public benefit LLC, so it is infact a private business operating on a freemium model.
I've pondered arranging Neocities as a nonprofit, but unfortunately that would add a ton of paperwork, costs, and bureaucracy. All I would really get in return is the option to roll the dice a couple times on some temp grants. Not sure it's worth it.
As for VC, I have good friends in VC, but I'm not really interested and nobody's ever offered. IMHO there's insufficient demand to justify 10x growth companies here. There's some people doing business/developer focused static hosting VC startups, but again, lots of competition and insufficient demand. Most of them have ended up as talent acquisitions, and the sites they hosted shut down. We've outlived most of them with the supporter/donation model.
Any webhost (paid or not) can disappear overnight, so it's generally a good practice to keep two or three copies of the source code of any website (one at a home computer, one on GitHub or something).
Besides, aren't kids into the whole ephemeral thing now (Snapchat and the like)?
> I have to admit I've been playing NES and SNES with roms on the computer since early 2000s. My parents wouldn't buy me any game consoles or handheld devices so the computer was the only way to go.
Hmm. Isn't this also an argument to support Nintendo now? When I was young I would buy CDs even though I had the mp3s already.
I've certainly struggled with the layout of exact stuff in Markdown ... but there's something about this name, the writing on the index.html, and the constant use of the unofficial file icon (which i'm really not a fan) that kind of irks me. Maybe it's the spirit of the naming? Maybe it's because of the effort to _brand_ this? And perhaps the developer-centric tone of the writing versus the writer-centric tone of the
original spec? I'm not sure.
From the original Markdown doc: "HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text." The lack of support for complex or exact layout was intentional.
As I read it, if you want your Markdown documents to be rendered a specific way, you choose/configure/write a Markdown parser that renders it that way (possibly with the assistance of an additional stylesheet). If you need a particular extension for a task (tables, syntax-highlighted code blocks) you can use an parser that supports them. And if you need specific HTML elements, you can use them inline.
The way I read it, Markdown is intended as an _input format for markup tools_, designed to be both legible and meaningful as plain text. Any meaning that can't be explicitly encoded in the ASCII format, including the specific HTML tags used to render a given construct, is outside Markdown's scope and should probably be stored in a more structured format.
It also looks like there are functions, but they're considerably shaved down compared to JavaScript/etc.
I wonder if this will get more adoption in the TW community and by various static site generators.