@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org By the way, which site generator are you using? I kind of miss having code blocks with syntax highlighting and that generic yellow highlighting thing is pretty cool, too.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Itâs the âLyse types the entire HTML by handâ generator. Yes, no kidding. I write articles so rarely, that I can do that once in a while. Itâs fun to some degree, but also not.
After some time, I finally recorded some Vim macros to insert <b>âŚ</b>, <var>âŚ</var>, <span class=s>âŚ</span> etc. around the tokens. This helped a little bit. But I was still questioning my mental state doing it like that. I also had to fix a bunch of the end tags by hand, because the word movement wasnât enough or the end movement went too far. Quite the annoying process for sure.
But I think the HTML looks a wee bit nicer and is maybe even semantically a little bit better than having only <span>s everywhere. I find the <span class="whatever"> just soo awfully long. Of course, I never look at the code again, but knowing, that e.g. there is a <b> and it saves so many bytes in comparison, makes me happy. It is a more elegant solution in my opinion. Not by much, but better nonetheless. Itâs a matter of simplicity. Admittedly, even I canât avoid the <span>s alltogether. Oh well. On the other hand, Iâm sure that this does not make any difference whatsoever. I bet, nobody and nothing, like a screenreader, analyzes the HTML for that, where this would be truly useful.
Oh! Maybe text browsers, though. It just occurred to me while composing this reply. :-) Haha, I lost my bet quickly. w3m picks up at least the <b> for keywords and builtin types, <u> for filenames and <i> for comments. Yey. No different styles for <var> and <mark>, unfortunately. elinks only renders the bold. Itâs cool that I had the right intuition right from the beginning, despite being unable to pinpoint it. :-)
All the <span> hell with common syntax highlighters is a downer for me that keeps me from looking more into them. If I wrote more articles, I might rig something up with Pygments. At least thatâs somehow positively connotated in my brain. Not sure if it actually deserves it, but I dealt with that in some loose form (canât even remember) years and years ago. Apparently, it wasnât too terrible.
To prepare the table of contents, I used grep and sed with some manual intervention in the end. The entire process can be improved. Absolutely.
You wrote your own site generator, didnât you?
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, I almost thought so (that you wrote it by hand), but then I looked at the source code and saw the TOC and I was like: âNaah, probably not. I would be way too lazy to do that manually.â đ And indeed ⌠ha.
Oh god, yeah, thatâs a lot of <span>. đ¤ Canât really avoid that, I guess, especially if you want to do syntax highlighting of code blocks.
You wrote your own site generator, didnât you?
In parts. I write everything in Markdown (itâs online, even: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-05-29/0/POSTING-en.md), plus a few Vim shortcuts (to generate thumbnails, for example), and then python-markdown renders it: https://pypi.org/project/Markdown/ This process is wrapped in a shell script, like âre-render every page if the .md file is newer than the .html fileâ and thatâs mostly it. And the Atom feed generator is completely custom. đ¤