Building Technical Cathedrals for an Audience That No Longer Visits Webs

Now, my website serves articles and lessons in Markdown if you use the "Accept: text/markdown" header.

You can try it yourself with the article you are reading right now.

curl -s -L -H "Accept: text/markdown" "https://en.andros.dev/blog/58441321/building-technical-cathedrals-for-an-audience-that-no-longer-visits-webs/"

I suppose more than one of you can already imagine the reason. And soon I will keep working to make it the same across the rest of my site.

Look at what level of madness we have reached in web development. Nowadays a website must:

• Adapt to both desktop and smartphone
• Be dynamic or have interactive sections (APIs, Frontends...)
• Be accessible (screen readers, color contrast...)
• Have good SEO (robots.txt, sitemap.xml, meta tags, structured data...)
• Have good performance (optionally pass PageSpeed Insights with dignity)
• Be a PWA or at least have a manifest.json
• Be readable by AIs (llms.txt, Markdown endpoints, Accept: text/markdown header...)

And yet, a paradox arises: while the technical complexity of web development scales to keep bots and AIs happy, human consumption seems to be in decline.

Of course, humans tend toward minimum effort. It is very difficult to have the knowledge base to develop a website that meets all the above requirements, but... it is very easy to write for AIs. Will Internet 3.0 be in Markdown?