Why awk?
Published
The AWK utility is a pattern scanning and processing language.
awk has been part of every Unix system since 1979.Its name comes from its authors: Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan. It reads text line by line, which is exactly what a markdown converter needs to do.
What it lacks
POSIX awk has no capture groups, no sorting and no include. awkward works around each of those, and stays portable as a result.
No JavaScript, no dependencies
awkward is built to need nothing that does not come with the system. There is no JavaScript anywhere: not on the server, not in the browser, and not in the tools that generate the site. The pages are plain HTML and CSS, written by awk and glued together by ksh.
The whole thing runs on a stock OpenBSD install, or on any other POSIX system that has ksh. There are no packages to install, no dependencies to manage, and no versions to keep in step, so a site that builds today will still build years from now.
The one exception is python3, which ./serve.sh uses to serve the site locally for testing.It is a convenience, not a requirement. Building and publishing work without it, and any other way of looking at the files in target does just as well.