Use markdown sources

[memowe]

I wrote this as issue #8 before but maybe it's better to go one step back and use this platform to discuss a strategy before.

Thanks for all your effort in this important project!

I think it would be great to have the book‘s content as markdown files instead of HTML files:

Pros:

1. It would make contributions much easier as it wouldn‘t require web authoring skills.
2. It would make diffs much more readable.
3. With pandoc and custom templates it would make exporting HTML, PDF or EPUB a very transparent process.

Cons:

1. Lots of work. Especially when it‘s a requirement to produce (almost) the same HTML result as before.
2. ...?

What do you think about it?

I'm willing to help if the community thinks this would be the right thing to do. Im looking forward to ideas and opinions. :)

[simon-nicholls]

I've only just become aware of this community effort to update LYAH, but am stoked it's a thing. Huge thanks to Miran Lipovača!

My thought is to focus on facilitating easy community participation first, and move to Markdown. Do we have the right to produce updated ebooks?

[ShaharNaveh]

I do think that it would be easier to maintain markdown instead of raw HTML.
I recommend the approach of using a static-site-generator like Hugo or Jekyll for example.
It has the benefit of using existing themes, a lot of them support features that we currently do no have such as:

• toggling dark/light mode
• copy button for codeblocks
• multi lingual support (if there's a need for that)
• mobile support

And probably much more.

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I do not have experience exporting static sites to PDF/epub, but from searching it online it seems relatively straightforward by creating a custom page template that contains all the site's pages and then converting the generated HTML to the desired format(s) with a tool like pandoc