web2js VS remark

When I last looked, it seemed like WASM blobs just take arrays of numbers and return arrays of numbers. No objects, strings, or DOM elements, so I think it'd be tough to do web dev in wasm as it stands. And you need javascript glue if you want anything in the way of side effects.

There is, however, quite a bit you can do in it. TeX has been compiled to wasm[1], it's about 600kb uncompressed 90k compressed (the memory image with latex loaded is about 6MB compressed though - latex is a beast). I think anything computationally intensive would be a good candidate for wasm (it has int64).

1: https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js

I implemented a TeX engine in WebAssembly so you really can run TeX in the browser. You can see a demo of this at https://tex.rossprogram.org/ and at https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js you can find a Pascal compiler that targets WebAssembly which can compile Knuth's TeX. Interesting primitives like \directjs are also implemented, so you can execute javascript from inside TeX. The rendering is handled with https://github.com/kisonecat/dvi2html for which I finally fixed some font problems.

To make it relatively fast, the TeX engine gets snapshotted and shipped to the browser with much of TeXlive already loaded. So even things like TikZ work reasonably well. There is of course a lot more to do! The plan is to convert ximera.osu.edu to this new backend by the fall.

I also didn't try this tool but it's called RemarkJS which is named too similar to revealjs.

remark. Primarily, this is a linter for Markdown. Additionally, thanks to its numerous plugins, it allows us to perform additional checks for grammatical mistakes within the content itself. Before using this linter, our content was not scrutinized to this extent.

Rehype and Remark are plugins used to transform and manipulate the HTML and Markdown content of a website, helping to enhance its functionality and appearance.

I usually combine remark-parse, remark-rehype and rehype-react to transform markdown into react components. The configuration of the processor is like:

Astro content collection are as simple as a folder containing a bunch of Markdown (or Markdoc or MDX) files if that's the only thing you need, but they can also do relationship matching between different collections, frontmatter validation using zod and you can also customize how the markdown is parsed and translated to html using rehype and remark and their plugin ecosystem.

On my personal blog I have few external links in my posts. I wanted to keep people on my website by applying target="_blank" on external (those what don't reference to my site) links. This is a common and good practice too. I write my content in Markdown, so I decided to write a remark plugin. It is simple to implement, just few lines of code.

Although we are building a custom table of contents, we won't have to write everything from scratch. To separate the Markdown/MDX content from the front matter, we'll use the Gray-matter package. It is optional in case you don't have front matter in your Markdown files. To process the Markdown itself, we'll use the Remark package. We'll also need the unist-util-visit package for traversing node trees and mdast-util-to-string for getting the text content of a node.

That's all to render the post as HTML, there are lots of things you can do to customize the results, you can check the remark plugins and rehype plugins to pass as props to and you can also take a look at some other bloggers if you're looking for different styles for example Lee Robinson's or if you liked mine.

contentlayer uses remark to parse the markdown in an mdast. We can now use remark plugins to modify the mdast. Then rehype comes into play and converts the mdast into a hast. rehype plugins can now modify the hast. Finally the hast is converted into react components.

Now we have our Cloudinary account set up, we can use it with Docusaurus. To do so, we need to create a remark plugin. This is a plugin for the remark markdown processor. It's a plugin that will transform the markdown image syntax into a Cloudinary URL.