It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
This is a neat little HTML preprocessor from Giuseppe Gurgone. It has very few features, but one of them is HTML includes, which is something I continue to be baffled that HTML doesn’t support natively. There are loads of ways to handle it. I think it’s silly that it’s been consistently needed for decades and HTML could evolve to support it but hasn’t. So anyway, enter another option for handling it.… Read article “xm”
If we need to show documentation to the user directly in the WordPress editor, what is the best way to do it?
Since the block editor is based on React, we may be tempted to use React components and HTML code for the documentation. That is the approach I followed in my previous article, which demonstrated a way to show documentation in a modal window.… Read article “Using Markdown and Localization in the WordPress Block Editor”
MDX is a killer feature for things like blogs, slide decks and component documentation. It allows you to write Markdown without worrying about HTML elements, their formatting and placement while sprinkling in the magic of custom React components when necessary.
Let’s harness that magic and look at how we can customize MDX by replacing Markdown elements with our own MDX components. In the process, we’ll introduce the concept of “shortcodes” when using those components.
As a heads up, the code … Read article “Working With MDX Custom Elements and Shortcodes”
Markdown has traditionally been a favorite format for programmers to write documentation. It’s simple enough for almost everyone to learn and adapt to while making it easy to format and style content. It was so popular that commands from Markdown have been used in chat applications like Slack and Whatsapp as document applications, like Dropbox Paper and Notion. When GitHub introduced Markdown support for README documentation, they also rendered HTML content from it — so, for example, we could drop … Read article “An Introduction to MDXJS”
Markdown supports HTML, so if you need to, say, embed a YouTube video, you can just copy and paste the embed code from them, drop it into a Markdown document, and you should be good to go. With YouTube specifically, there are other options. But in general, you don’t need to do anything special to embed third-party media in Markdown.
You do need to do whatever is necessary for that particular service though. For example, on CodePen, you visit … Read article “Embedded Content in Markdown”
One of the more powerful concepts I’ve stumbled across recently is the idea of abstract syntax trees, or ASTs. If you’ve ever studied alchemy, you may recall that the whole motivation for alchemists was to discover some way to transform not-gold into gold through scientific or arcane methods.
ASTs are kind of like that. Using ASTs, we can transform Markdown into HTML, JSX into JavaScript, and so much more.… Read article “How to Modify Nodes in an Abstract Syntax Tree”
You can have the best open source project in the world but, if it doesn’t have good documentation, chances are it’ll never take off. In the office, good documentation could save you having to repeatedly answer the same questions. Documentation ensures that people can figure out how things work if key employees decide to leave the company or change roles. Well documented coding guidelines help bring consistency to a codebase.
If you’re writing long-form text, Markdown is clearly a great … Read article “Front-End Documentation, Style Guides and the Rise of MDX”
Pretty specific, huh? While we’re going to do exactly what the title says, this post is more about a learning exercise and an example of getting help on the internet.… Read article “Creating Cue Files from Markdown”
Good thinking and exploration by Sebastian Eberlein. I’m a firm believer that you’re doing yourself a favor if you blog in Markdown, because it gives you clean HTML output that isn’t littered with classes very likely won’t last forever.
Instead, why not use some clever CSS selectors (using stuff like adjacent sibling combinators) to get the spacing and styling you want without changing the markup. CSS is a lot easier to change than HTML. HTML within content, that … Read article “Dealing with Spacing in Compiled Markdown Articles”
This is mostly for me. These are the little things that sometimes confuse me about Markdown and I find myself having to search the web for. So I’ll write them down. Blogging as memory extension.
Know that your mileage may vary on this stuff, as there are many varietals of Markdown.… Read article “Little Stuff about Markdown I Always Forget and have to Google”
