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kevinkoning 17 hours ago [-]
Markdown is a beautiful demonstration that document structure syntax can/should be simple. What most people do in Word is better done by just adjusting the document rendering/style, not the document structure...
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:
Tables are the one thing in markdown where I’d prefer to emphasize edit ergonomics over good looking unrendered text. Making a quick manual change like adding column to a markdown table is just unfun. I’ve always thought a json like format that a linter can organize would be better.
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
4 hours ago [-]
freedomben 14 hours ago [-]
> Making a quick manual change like adding column to a markdown table is just unfun.
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.
jez 13 hours ago [-]
Even in Vim, the editing experience falls over when making markdown tables that have non-trivial content in their cells (multiple paragraphs, a code block, etc.). I recently learned that reStructuredText supports something called "list tables":
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).
reStructuredText & AsciiDoc are so, so much better than Markdown since they have rich feature sets to actually build documentation, blogging, & so on. It’s a massive shame everyone would prefer _yet another Markdown fork_ like the OP.
nine_k 14 hours ago [-]
Same in Emacs, and, I suppose, in any editor with enough self-respect to support vertical blocks.
thunderbong 8 hours ago [-]
That's basically any editor with multi-cursor capability.
cush 13 hours ago [-]
Any editor plugin makes it easy though
franga2000 3 hours ago [-]
Not to defend Word et. al. too much, they have plenty of problems, but keeping the structure simple and applying a style over it is a completely supported way of doing things.
I have documents with essentialy zero direct styling, just paragraph styles (for headings, bullets, code blocks, quotes) and character styles (links, inline code). The UI isn't super well optimized for that, but once you get used to it, it's so much nicer than Markdown or LaTeX for multi-page print work.
esafak 17 hours ago [-]
What's the : in the divider?
microflash 16 hours ago [-]
That's header alignment marker. If it's on right, the header cell is aligned to right.
amcaskill 16 hours ago [-]
I work on a dashboarding / BI solution that is also built around markdown and clickhouse. www.evidence.dev
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:
Yeah, why not go directly the route of custom HTML elements in Markdown anyway, since HTML inside Markdown is valid?
mbreese 9 hours ago [-]
My guess is parsability. It’s easier to look for sentinel ``` blocks as opposed to building an HTML processor. An XML processor would have been easier, but people like Markdown. So, here we are.
At least, that would’ve my rationale.
FailMore 13 hours ago [-]
This is cool. Can you tell me more about the :: blocks thing. I didn’t know that was a Markdown element.
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!
meagher 6 hours ago [-]
> Can you tell me more about the :: blocks thing. I didn’t know that was a Markdown element.
They are Markdown directives
FailMore 49 minutes ago [-]
Tyvm
ivan_gammel 1 hours ago [-]
The only reason to use markdown is that you can read it and write it in a text editor unaware of syntax and rendering semantics. When this purpose is lost and your UX or reading or writing a document starts depending on renderer and your knowledge of how it works, the result becomes just another rich document format, where editor abstraction is a must. And then why all this is even needed? ODF does the job well.
nzoschke 16 hours ago [-]
Looks cool.
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.
I was expecting to find a link to a github pages site where I can see the rendered examples, but only found a link to the html sources in examples/out. Am I missing something?
jesus thank you, im so wary of any project that isn't going to do this bare minimum. static pages on gh are literally free it feels absurd to post this project to HN without doing that.
FailMore 12 hours ago [-]
I feel your pain. My project is https://sdocs.dev, the homepage is actually the rendering of a markdown file (sdoc.md), so you can see how SDocs renders immediately. There are some links on the homepage to other Markdown files with some elaborate styles and charts
garyfirestorm 14 hours ago [-]
nope this is becoming a theme. many showhn posts that are about visualizations do not have any renderings of said visualizations. especially in github readme.
chelm 9 hours ago [-]
Funny to see this approach trending! I published this a month ago.
- 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.
You have gone the full latex route. very interesting project. my purpose was simple, to keep mdv extremely simple nothing complex. I do not want full html/latex replication and for surely no inline code...
> 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.
0xbadcafebee 5 hours ago [-]
Always find it funny that software developers are stuck in the 1980's when it comes to making documents. Meanwhile normal people use programs to point and click with the new-fangled technology called "a mouse", and create richer documents that convey more information easier, and they do it faster. I guess when you get paid to write in code, it only makes sense to write more code.
phyzix5761 16 hours ago [-]
Nice project. But at what point does Markdown just become Emacs Org-Mode? At least with Emacs you can write Lisp to make your document do anything you want.
AlecSchueler 16 hours ago [-]
Deepening on who your users are you might also say "at least with markdown they write Lisp and make their documents do whatever they like."
arikrahman 15 hours ago [-]
I'm struggling to figure out why I wouldn't just use Emacs Org or even Typst for this use case.
maleldil 12 hours ago [-]
Typst is amazing, but if you want HTML output, it's not quite there yet.
pixelmonkey 13 hours ago [-]
This seems cool. For going from Markdown to slides I’ve often used Marp: https://marp.app/ — It doesn’t require much specialized syntax, it mostly does the right thing to turn plain Markdown sections into slides. Simple self-hostable HTML output and PDF export options. Already has a VSCode preview plugin, too. I noticed that Claude Code is able to generate Marp slides for you if you ask it, as well.
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.
daylab 3 hours ago [-]
there's so many of these now lol. what made you go with this over just extending mdx? also how do you handle escape when the expression body has * or # in it
ifh-hn 15 hours ago [-]
I'm using quarto for this sort of thing.
woodydesign 15 hours ago [-]
Very cool.
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.
zbyforgotp 3 hours ago [-]
Frontmatter should now be in the markdown standard.
dhruv3006 10 hours ago [-]
I like how markdown has now become a trend - would be interesting to see how this tool matures !
Looks wonderful, is there a skill or prompt that can teach agents how to use this format?
FailMore 12 hours ago [-]
Maybe not a direct answer to your question, but https://sdocs.dev has a cli built for agents. ‘sdoc —help’ and ‘sdoc schema’ and ‘sdoc charts’ teach your agent how to use it. You can try it with ‘npm i -g sdocs-dev’
gkfasdfasdf 10 hours ago [-]
Putting the markdown in the URL, that is very clever!
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:
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).
[1] https://markdoc.dev
[2] https://markdoc.dev/docs/tags#table
[3] https://github.com/pandoc-ext/list-table
[4] https://github.com/bpj/pandoc-list-table
I have documents with essentialy zero direct styling, just paragraph styles (for headings, bullets, code blocks, quotes) and character styles (links, inline code). The UI isn't super well optimized for that, but once you get used to it, it's so much nicer than Markdown or LaTeX for multi-page print work.
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.
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!
They are Markdown directives
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.
https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions/pull/5206
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...
> .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.
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.
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.
PS : Even I built an API tool on markdown - https://voiden.md.