unified VS mdx

From TFA:

> My idea was that surely it's possible to write a bunch of markdown, and then have that get wrapped in a bunch of JSX tags that come pre-styled, using the styles of your existing repo? For example, what I expected was to be able to write *test* (Markdown for bold) and then get a component that looked liketest where is a library-defined React component

It surely is possible, so perhaps I can share some links if others are wondering the same thing.

If you like to roll your own solution for that, you can use the unified ecosystem: https://unifiedjs.com/

However, if you want JSX just do what everyone does and reach for MDX:

Styling the blog, figure out the eco-system within UnifiedJs, remark-rehype, oh boy, I could write another blog with that.

To build the Markdown editor (and the preview, mostly), I decided to use unified, an ecosystem of tools allowing the developer to parse a format into an abstract tree and back into another format (for example, markdown to html) and modify said tree (for example, to add specific classes to certain html elements before they are converted to an actual html string. The basics of how to do so can be found in this article, but they mostly consist of:

It’ll take you a few hours to become proficient in the “unified” syntax tree libraries. So worth it. Easy fully customized conversion to/from html, react, plain text, markdown, you name it. https://unifiedjs.com/

Why universal? Because a lot of languages are simillar in a bunch of ways and it might be good to reuse existing parts of the compiler to speed up the process of writing new DSLs for example. Also a pretty big use-case is not for compilers itself but just for transformers like Markdown to HTML, there are already a lot of libraries (like https://github.com/unifiedjs/unified for ASTs and https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ for parsing) that try achieve similar goals but they are not working together.

Unified is a framework to process Markdown. It's a plugin-based tool that allows you to inspect and modify the way Markdown is converted to other formats like HTML.

under the hood, the markdown is parsed by the unified remark and rehype processors, which in turn under the hood manipulate the markdown + HTML as an AST, which gives a lot of flexibility on parsing and rendering markdown. The editor uses them as plugins, which allows me to pick the features and inject them into the editor, one such injectable feature is the custom-made "copy from anywhere & paste as markdown" feature.

Having the flexibility to create custom React Components for markdown is essential and with react-markdown, we can achieve this in just a few lines of code. Boosting performance, increasing link security, and having overall increased capabilities for our markdown data are what we achieve here. Aside from the improvements within our application, this component is super easy to use and taps us into the unifiedjs (giving us superpowers!).

The Markdown processor used unified assets.

Yes, this is an interesting topic. In Motif, we are using MDX for the page content, which has an associated AST and a nice set of tools (Unified.js [1]) to manipulate it. We plan to use this to track semantic changes in the content, and act in an appropriate way. For instance, if the same block of JS code is changed, instead of merging, we can prompt the user with a diff and allow them to edit the final version manually (effectively transitioning from a synchronous to an asynchronous workflow). In simpler scenarios, such as text markup, we can use heuristics like the ones presented in Peritext [2].

[1] https://unifiedjs.com/

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.

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

Last, but certainly not least, among my favorite frameworks is the family of frameworks based on MDX. Before that, let’s understand what is MDX and how does it vary from MD.

Are you a developer looking to create a blog or personal website that is both easy to maintain and visually appealing? Look no further than using Next.js and MDX!

My first reaction was to use MDX and use next/image just as in the example. But that means that we can't use normal markdown images and it turns out that this won't work with contentlayer. This wont work, because Next.js does some magic on the import of the static image. The object which gets returned by the import, contains not only a path to the image, it contains also the width and height, plus a very small version of the image for the blurred placeholder. This magic does not work if the MDX file is loaded with contentlayer, because contentlayer uses its own bundler, which does not know about the import magic for images.