Weber used to be a custom programming language that compiles to web-langs, but I've decided to use Markdown for the HTML bit now. I'm trying to keep things simple, and GitHub already supports .md files and renders them to a digestible html (just like this file!)

I've got a couple ideas for a workflow that could work well, including a website that you can upload a .zip to, edit things, and just download the .zip again.

Maybe even a desktop app? Idk that seems a bit unnecessarily complicated. It does have a certain appeal though...

I know Jekyll exists, but it seems a pain to set up - especially if anyone wants to make a site without any knowledge of the commandline. (typing commands in a vulnerable place on your pc without knowing what it does seems a bit... yeah.) Using the same line of reasoning, downloading apps from an unknown source would be a bad idea too...

When I make a language, I like to do mockups of the finished language, and then try to implement it - it helps to get the concept clear in my head. I thought I could do the same here.

HTML can be a tough nut to crack, but I thought that just copying the Markdown syntax would be a good solution for that. After all, people already know it, and its easy to pick up from the many tutorials that are out there.

Markdown has a lot of features damn. I might use a library for this. Any good ideas? I was thinking of making my own compiler, and then I'd be able to add more features and things, but tbh, that seems like it could be hard, especially for a smaller project like this one. If this gets enough traction, I might consider making a proper Markdown compiler, using my Elements library, particularly Meal, as it has been very useful thus far.

CSS could just be declared inside a .css file. It's a pretty easy-to-understand syntax. Then again, the complexities of CSS are really tough, even for people with experience.

Perhaps an optional .json or .yml file could work instead? (Yml is very similar in functionality to json, just a different syntax.) Things like

{
    "div": {
        "centered": true
    }
}

could be done easily. And preprocessed CSS could also be implemented with things like

{
    "div": {
        "background-color": {
            "condition": "dark_theme",
            "true": "#111C14",
            "false": "#ffffff"
        }
    }
}

which would change the background colour based on if the theme is in dark mode, although I'm not sure how that could be changed... Maybe JavaScript? Perhaps a new form of event system that <button> elements could have? idk. A switch statement could also be implemented, to produce a similar result, but slightly different syntax...

{
    "div": {
        "background-color": {
            "switch": "theme",
            "dark": "#111C14",
            "light": "#ffffff",
            "sunset": "#E66000",
            "midnight": "#000000"
        }
    }
}

Damn, I've really gone overboard with this haven't I? I think I'll play around with a concept like this and make it more fleshed out. I should do a proper documentation to go through these ideas, and then let people unleash their creativity!

I don't really know how I'd do this, as any form of eval() or new Function() could pose a security risk. Tbh I'm not sure how I could get around that anyway.

Unless I make a completely different language for it...

No Mag, bad idea.

I was thinking that a .json file in the root folder could do configuration and general settings, but I'm not sure what kind of settings would be helpful.

Oh wait I haven't talked about the folder structure have I? So it's all in a folder, and it can be called anything, let's call it project/ and...

I'll just draw a tree diagram, it's easier.

project/
|   // all the compiled HTML, CSS & JS
|   source/
|   |   config.json // general settings and stuff
|   |   global_css.json // or .css
|   |   ignore.json // a list of the pages/files not to compile to web-langs
|   |   pages/
|   |   |   // all the pages that are in markdown, json, and things like that
|   |   assets/
|   |   |   // pictures, audio, videos, gifs, things like that
|   |   plugins/
|   |   |   // I might be overthinking it again

Yeah this looks like its a lot of small projects - but I'll see how this goes. I might need to trim things down as I need to. Here are my current plans for it:

• Folder manipulation in browser
  • Uploading 100%
    • Click to upload
    • Drag and Drop
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • Downloading again (might need .zip for this)
• Markdown to HTML compiler (find / make)
• Custom JSON to CSS compiler
  • Static CSS
  • Precompiled CSS
• Config options that could be helpful
• Eat lunch

If you have any suggestions for how I can improve this - I'd really appreciate them! Please feel free to open an issue explaining what could work and I'll give it a go!