>In the end, your document is now fully an HTML document, not a Markdown document that becomes an HTML document. It’s a minor perspective shift, but might have some cascading effects on things I’ve written above.
But this style of custom-elements requires successful javascript program execution to achieve that "HTML" document. Just like markdown requires some parser program to turn it in to HTML. It's not really fully an HTML document.
It's a good idea. It just would be a better one to write the custom-elements as wrappers for actual HTML elements. Like how https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components-an-exa... shows instead of trying to do it SPA style and requiring perfect JS execution for anything to show properly.
HTML mark-up really isn't that heavy. The avoidance of it seems mostly to be because it's considered "old" and "old" is bad, or at least not useful on a resume. But it's old because it's so good it's stuck around for a long time. Only machine generated HTML is bulky. Hand written can be just as neat and readable as any Markdown.
Custom elements are really great for editors and developers. You can provide a rich set of primitives that editors can use to display certain content. In the past, I used MDX [1] extensively so non-technical writers can create a rich UI for a documentation site.
- [1] https://mdxjs.com/
At Stripe, we built Markdoc to solve many of the issues mentioned!
> I didn’t find the need for blank lines in the CommonMark spec,
It's in #6 and #7
https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks
I too ran a site on markdown with HTML. Originally I had my own hacky way of using HTML which was effectively to (1) replace all HTML with placeholder_number (2) format the markdown (3) replace placeholder_number with the html that used to be there. Not as simple as that but close.
Eventually i switched to a commonmark spec formatter and then tried to fix any old pages that had spaces in the HTML. Some were basically hard to fix like a pre section with code inside so I added some other hacks to do the same as above for those sections by surrounding them with {{#html}}....stuff..with...blank...lines{{/html}}.
So now my solution is handlebars.js meets markdown-it.
It certainly is a joy! I'd generalise it to any reasonable plaintext format.
Org mode keeps me locked in for this very reason.
No need for Emacs... pandoc (which I use) builds my static site. It supports enough Org markup to let me compile header metadata, latex, footnotes, markup etc. as well as inline live JavaScript code and use it in-page, just like I'd do in a regular stand-alone HTML page.
For example: a post with inlined static HTML and JavaScript, freely mixed-and-matched with org-native source block syntax. No plugins needed.
Raw: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adityaathalye/shite/refs/h...
Pandoc-rendered live site: Compare Raw source with this section: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/animate-text-art-javascript/...
Github-rendered in repo (not github pages): It is (surprisingly) good enough for most Org content, including generating a nice Table of Contents... Except for any footnotes, and inlined or hosted JavaScript source (understandably, security may be a concern). https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite/blob/master/sources/p...
"...Pre-processing and the initial excitement of a domain-specific language is a siren that might lead you to your doom.
(I swear, I have never tried to do something this foolish… I swear…)..."
I will say, that almost didn't make me laugh, bur, I will not swear.
I've recently come off from one such rabbit hole - A CLI tool for Pre-processing vue project templates. It was over-engineered.
Will probably go back to re-build it when I get the free time.
└── Dey well; Be well
I use https://github.com/nuxt-modules/mdc with a Nuxt Content project. Also looked at https://markdoc.dev
Unfortunately, also not-joy of completely unbreakable website ... https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/TPJZ2AeN/100001246...
Always curious why no one has made Markdown + pugjs-style[0] html parsing system.
My tool of choice for what TFA describes is Vitepress. Markdown plus about a dozen useful plugins and understands Vue3 components and treats each *.md as an SFC.
It hits a sweet spot for me.
I'm currently using Markdig in Razor Components (Blazor). I wonder if I could get Razor Components rendered in the markdown.
Ha! Small world! I just started building a documentation editor using markdown, built as a custom element[0]. It's still deeply in alpha, but there is a working demo, at least!
Nice to see pro-Markdown literature that extends its application, but not to the extent that (that I’ve found) its detractors use against it.
There are a lot of nooks in crannies in this article.
What's the advantage of using Web Components here? Why not process the tag on the server side aswell and replace it with Html?
I've recently hit a very similar problem. There's various problems with the web components (like he mentions) and I wanted a better way to write plain html with components. I ended up making a tiny python build script to process fake html components into proper HTML: https://github.com/shminge/builder
I've designed it for myself, deliberately to work around the flaws with web components mentioned. It hugely speeds up my process of writing pages for my blog (after trying everything, I've ended up just writing plain html) because I can define a component that holds all the boilerplate of the page (header, css, etc) and then write my pages as `<pagelayout> <p> body content here </p> </pagelayout>` and have that be expanded into proper valid HTML
I recently discovered a static site generator called Astro, which supports many syntaxes but the .astro is a nice mix of TypeScript and JSX-like syntax. Content can use MDX which is like Markdown but with {JSX} style markup for variables and etc. The static components are used very similar to React, with familiar import statements and <ComponentName props=etc> patterns. It is extremely easy to pick up. Best of all, it has plugins to support all sorts of other interactivity, so you can create interactive 'islands' of content using React or Preact or SolidJS or Vue etc. That way you have most of your content statically generated, and then the dynamic parts can be done from the client side.
Best of all, if you use simple unchanged files for other dynamic stuff like JSON etc, you can just generate those on build and serve those files in the host directly as the 'response' to a simple REST request, which is sometimes overlooked despite being the most fundamental form of a REST API.
https://astro.build/
I came across this after researching various options for a website that had, mostly for my own entertainment, restrictions on wanting to be mostly statically generated but customizable easily without learning a lot of new syntax / etc, something JSX-like with Markdown support etc, and MDX was an immediate find - and astro was the easiest SSG I found for it after trying with 11ty and several others. Actually felt like a delight playing with it.