evidence VS mdx

We use echarts at https://evidence.dev and have been quite happy with it. We do a lot of embedded analytics and it's worked well for us.

It’s interesting to me how far you have pushed the SQL language in this framework, such that it truly is “SQL only”.

The challenge as I see it with enabling analysts to build websites is that you need to build abstractions to get from familiar (SQL, yaml) - the language of analytics, to new (HTML, CSS, JS) - the language of the web browser

As one of the maintainers of Evidence (https://evidence.dev), one of the things I’ve often considered is how accessible our syntax is to analysts. Our syntax combines SQL and Markdown, with MDX style components e.g.

The are inherently webdev-ey, and I do think they put off potential users.

On the flip-side, by adhering to web standards, you get extensibility out of the box, and working out what to do is just a Google search away.

Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking piece.

Dataclips was my first experiences writing SQL.

Writing code was a markedly better DX that building dashboards in Tableau, which is why I'm now working on https://evidence.dev - a SSG for creating data from SQL and markdown

Previous HN discussions:

I'm one of the founders of Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - would be great to hear about your experience. Reaching out now!

Full fledged BI tools like Superset and Metabase are amazing for their intended use cases.

But they may be an overkill if your primary use case is to infrequently build semi-interactive reports for non-technical end-users and your use cases are are mostly covered by standard graphs & tables. Esp. so if you are familiar with SQL and have access to the underlying data source. Two nifty utilities I have found to be very useful for latter kind of use cases are SQLPage and Evidence.

They make it very convenient to whip out some SQL and convert that to a neat professional looking web ui that can be forwarded to an end user. In case of Evidence it is a statically generated site, and in case of SQLPage it is a web app that connects to a live database.

SQLPage: https://sql.ophir.dev/

Evidence: https://evidence.dev

We used ECharts to build our charting library at Evidence and it’s been a great experience overall (https://evidence.dev).

We started with D3 and a few other tools, but felt that we get a lot more out of the box with ECharts, like interactivity and an events API. ECharts is also a lot more extensible than people give it credit for.

If anyone is curious, we documented the process of selecting a charting library after assessing several options: https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence/issues/136

The new direction seems very similar to what evidence has been doing for a while

https://evidence.dev

I'm quite excited about this, and would also love to have it distributed as an NPM package.

I work on an OSS web framework for reporting/ decision support applications (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence), and we use WASM duckDB as our query engine. Several folks have asked for PRQL support, and this looks like it could be a pretty seamless way to add it.

> Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience.

Fully agree with this, and having typeset my masters thesis and later my resume using LaTeX, I think that the “authoring experience” is 100% the place to focus on improving.

If you’re interested in the “markup to document publishing” space, you might also be interested in the open-source report publishing tool I’m now working on, Evidence (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence)

It’s similarly based on markdown, though uses code fences to execute code, HTML style tags for charts and components, and {…} for JavaScript, i.e.

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Semantify was made for content creators, marketers, and anyone looking to enhance their long-form written content. Currently only supporting MDX-based content, It automates the enrichment of MDX blog posts by adding AI-generated Q&A sections that summarize the content, and recommendations for semantically similar posts. This not only makes the content more accessible and engaging but also helps in establishing deeper connections between different posts, ultimately keeping the reader engaged for longer periods.

https://mdxjs.com/

> We thought this would be a no-brainer and that there would be some CMS/SSG libraries out there that made this Markdown conversion process easy and facilitated integration with any number of frontend frameworks.

You thought correct:

- NextJS MDX integration: https://nextjs.org/docs/pages/building-your-application/conf...

The example above uses react-markdown, but you can use any library you want to render the markdown content. You can also use a transform function to modify the markdown content during the build process. Here is an example that uses MDX to compile the markdown content.

MDX is a js library that allows us to import a markdown file as a react component and use it anywhere.

/blog/ - This directory contains all the markdown files, of your site blogs, you can simply add a new blog by using markdown, or simply remove a blog file by deleting its file, you can combine the markdown with MDX, resulting a well-written blog post.

Hey HN!

This is a little personal project I've been hacking on for the past ~week, somewhat inspired by this blog post [0] ("My Wonderful HTML Email Workflow").

Basically I just wanted an easy way to create email templates in MDX [1] (Markdown + JSX), using React Email [2] components.

It's still a bit of a work in progress (and a bit slow at the moment) but wanted to share in case anyone else finds it interesting!

[0] https://www.joshwcomeau.com/react/wonderful-emails-with-mjml...

[1] https://mdxjs.com/

[2] https://react.email/

That’s why formats like Markdown (MD) and MDX (MD with support for JSX) are so popular for use cases like documentation, knowledge bases, or technical blogs. They allow you to use any kind of custom formatting or elements and then process the content for publishing. On top of that, they’re great for implementing a docs-as-code approach, where your documentation lives right beside your code (i.e. in a Git repo).

MDX