import * as components from './components/text'
import Video from ./components/video'
export markdown(components)`
  # hello there
  \`\`\`
  My code snippet ${<Image />}
  \`\`\`  
`

In addition to letting us quickly write markdown, it has some really powerful benefits:

It's still JS, which means we can do imports, define helpers, assert that it's valid via a linter, etc.
We can embed JSX components inside Markdown. This is a must for us, because we like writing blog posts (https://zeit.co/blog) that have diverse content inside.

However, in my opinion, a lot of the benefits of "writing markdown" are lost. For example, as you see above, escaping code blocks becomes cumbersome.

As a result, I've been playing with an idea in my mind for a potential custom webpack loader and a new format called mdx, which brings the "best of both worlds" of JSX and Markdown.

Imagine my-blog-post.mdx:

import Video from '../components/video'
# My blog post
```
my code!
```
And here's a video:
<Video width={300} src="video.mp4" />

This looks great IMO, however, some important problems remain:

How do we lint? It should be impossible to include <Vid> because it's not imported, but <Video> should work. Can we extend eslint to understand .mdx ?
How do we defined the default set of components? One option would be to pass them to the webpack loader configuration
How do we override one component? Let's say we want to use a custom paragraph renderer. An idea here would be to standarize on a series of names, so that you can just do import P from '../components/paragraph'
How do we prettify it? Another issue we have with our markdown pages is that the markdown inside ends up looking really ugly, unless you painstakingly format it by hand. Can we extend prettier to understand .mdx?

If someone in the community wants to start playing around with a prototype, please share!

February 9, 2018 at 5:51pm

Max Stoiber@mxstbr

5:51pm

I need this so badly, pleeease

5:52pm

I've wanted this kind of thing a million times!

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