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
> 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.
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).
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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" /%} ```
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
> .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.