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).
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.
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 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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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’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.
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’
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":
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
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.
Same in Emacs, and, I suppose, in any editor with enough self-respect to support vertical blocks.
Any editor plugin makes it easy though
What's the : in the divider?
That's header alignment marker. If it's on right, the header cell is aligned to right.
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:
``` {% area_chart data="my_table" x="date" y="sum(revenue)" date_grain="week" /%} ```
This is XML without the < and >
Yeah, why not go directly the route of custom HTML elements in Markdown anyway, since HTML inside Markdown is valid?
This is cool. Can you tell me more about the :: blocks thing. I didn’t know that was a Markdown element.
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!
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?
I was curious to see them, too, so I uploaded the HTML examples here: https://tacticaltypos-tools.pgs.sh/mdv/examples/out/
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.
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
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 like how markdown has now become a trend - would be interesting to see how this tool matures !
PS : Even I built an API tool on markdown - https://voiden.md.
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.
https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions/pull/5206
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.
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.
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."
I'm struggling to figure out why I wouldn't just use Emacs Org or even Typst for this use case.
Typst is amazing, but if you want HTML output, it's not quite there yet.
All of these are supported in pandoc markdown:
> .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.
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.
I'm using quarto for this sort of thing.
Looks wonderful, is there a skill or prompt that can teach agents how to use this format?
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’
Putting the markdown in the URL, that is very clever!