Cloudflare has announced a new feature that automatically serves websites in Markdown to AI agents. With Markdown for Agents, the company is responding to
The autistic community has been dying for this kind of accessibility accommodation for years.
I cannot express how deeply this angers me. Though i am happy to exploit the fuck out of this for personal use.
“Markdown offers a cleaner, more semantically clear representation of the content. This means less noise for language models and other text-analysis systems people that process information neurodivergently, resulting in more efficient processing and potentially lower compute costs real life physical exhaustion.“
My brother, this is not just autistic people. Everyone wants this. Except the people who make the sites, because all that noise is how they make money.
If you look at a private blog, they’re usually devoid of much noise.
MD is a nearly ideal format. I keep my personal notes and time management stuff in Obsidian using markdown. Write my blog in Markdown. AsciiDoc is nice, too, for certain use cases.
The next step is for Cloudflare to introduce a proprietary markdown tags, then release a library to parse their new crap, then update their systems so it serves degraded ‘legacy’ markdown but include a paid API to get access to the ‘new’ markdown, then add features to the library that can only be accessed by API customers, etcetc
I see a commercial entity embrace something and start looking for the extend and extinguish part.
I have ASD; I made several tools that explicitly convert web sources to .md and JSON.
The shitty thing is, a lot of sites - even if they have stuff available in simple, beautiful JSON format, refuse to give public access to it. Notoriously, movie session times for local cinemas. That should be a simple look up…but no.
Oh well, at least cool shit like this still exists
Yes, and the way this reader functionality works is using structured tags in the HTML code. A very small effort that leads to a magnitude in accessibility that some just do not give an F about.
The kicker here is that these tags also impact SEO heavily, so not having them not only makes it harder for many people to use or read some sites, but it also makes them score lower on search engines.
The autistic community has been dying for this kind of accessibility accommodation for years.
I cannot express how deeply this angers me. Though i am happy to exploit the fuck out of this for personal use.
“Markdown offers a cleaner, more semantically clear representation of the content. This means less noise for
language models and other text-analysis systemspeople that process information neurodivergently, resulting in more efficient processing andpotentiallylowercompute costsreal life physical exhaustion.“My brother, this is not just autistic people. Everyone wants this. Except the people who make the sites, because all that noise is how they make money.
If you look at a private blog, they’re usually devoid of much noise.
MD is a nearly ideal format. I keep my personal notes and time management stuff in Obsidian using markdown. Write my blog in Markdown. AsciiDoc is nice, too, for certain use cases.
❌️ Adding accessibility features to make the internet usable by anyone
✅️
anyoneother computersWoohoo, the interests of capital have coincidentally aligned with ours in this one brief moment!
The next step is for Cloudflare to introduce a proprietary markdown tags, then release a library to parse their new crap, then update their systems so it serves degraded ‘legacy’ markdown but include a paid API to get access to the ‘new’ markdown, then add features to the library that can only be accessed by API customers, etcetc
I see a commercial entity embrace something and start looking for the extend and extinguish part.
I have ASD; I made several tools that explicitly convert web sources to .md and JSON.
The shitty thing is, a lot of sites - even if they have stuff available in simple, beautiful JSON format, refuse to give public access to it. Notoriously, movie session times for local cinemas. That should be a simple look up…but no.
Oh well, at least cool shit like this still exists
https://github.com/chubin/wttr.in
https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy
don’t “reader” views in web browsers essentially accomplish the same thing?
Yes, and the way this reader functionality works is using structured tags in the HTML code. A very small effort that leads to a magnitude in accessibility that some just do not give an F about.
The kicker here is that these tags also impact SEO heavily, so not having them not only makes it harder for many people to use or read some sites, but it also makes them score lower on search engines.