I love the idea of extending markdown to include more visual elements, but if you're not careful you just reinvent HTML.
Here's my personal take on extending table syntax for charts. Easy to write, and if a renderer/parser understands the syntax you get a beautiful chart, and if it doesn't you get a table with slightly weird headings:
| Month::x | Revenue::y1 | Cost::y2 |
| -------- | ----------: | -------: |
| Jan | $82,000 | $51,000 |
| Feb | $91,000 | $56,000 |
| Mar | $95,000 | $58,000 |Which is all to say I really like the table proposal here - adding an optional linter to make the data look tabular in unrendered markdown will make it even better
This is one of those moments where I realize that the vim life spoils me. It's so easy to do this in vim that I don't even think about. I probably use it a dozen times per day such as commenting out code.
Ctrl + v, select where you want the character, then hit I (shift + i), type your thing, hit escape, and Bob's your uncle.
https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/directives.html...
Where a table is specified as a depth-2 list and then post processed into a table. Lists support the full range of block elements already: you can have multiple paragraphs, code blocks, more lists, etc. inside a list item.
This syntax inspired the author of Markdoc[1] (who came from an rST background) to support tables using `<hr>`-separated lists[2] instead of nested lists (to provide more visual separation between rows).
I have found various implementations of list table filters for Pandoc markdown[3][4], but have never gotten around to using any of them (and I've tossed around ideas of implementing my own).
[2] https://markdoc.dev/docs/tags#table
https://wire.wise-relations.com/guides/components/
my takeaway:
- add lint or errors, otherwise your formatting will break, e.g. LLMs and humans will add text too long or too short and your design system will not be able to handle this.
- it's great for low token input
- validate the layout of the user vs. the components used.
- seen here before: https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/syntax/optional...
This problem has risen to the top of many people’s minds at this moment (including mine!). My Show HN for a similar cli + web based solution (https://sdocs.dev) is on the /show page now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).
I also went with Front Matter for styling and added an interactive styling mode you can do on the web to test it out immediately. There are some examples on my homepage which demonstrate it in action.
SDocs is cli -> instantly rendered on web
Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`): https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)... The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").
The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.
This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url.
Also, I’m sorry I high jacked your post to some degree with this comment. It’s just a little too relevant for me not to leave a comment!
We moved to stripe's Markdoc variant for the component syntax last year and have been really happy with it. Models are good at writing it, people are good at reviewing it.
Here's an area chart that would issue a SQL query for weekly revenue totals:
``` {% area_chart data="my_table" x="date" y="sum(revenue)" date_grain="week" /%} ```
At least, that would’ve my rationale.
I continue to love Markdown and always push it a bit further than Commonmark, with frontmatter, schemas, code fence metadata too.
I've been enjoying https://djot.net/ as a superset of Markdown that is feels very well designed and extensible too.
You may look into its syntax and tooling for prior art or some extra lift.
I'm trying to get a djot extension in Zed for syntax highlighting if anyone minds adding a to help signal some community interest.
PS : Even I built an API tool on markdown - https://voiden.md.
Best for slides that are just bullet points, full-slide images, and code. Especially code. Less good if you have a lot of images or need to do your own styles or layout.
> .mdv is strict CommonMark plus four additions:
> YAML front-matter for title, theme, named styles, and dataset references.
> Fenced blocks for data/visuals: ```chart type=bar x=region y=sales.
> ::: containers for styled regions and layout: ::: callout / ::: columns.
> ::: toc for an auto-generated table of contents.
I’m a product designer, and I could totally see this fitting into my workflow for design briefs, strategy, review, and crit docs. Markdown is too simple, and Figma is too visual. This feels like a great middle ground.