Show HN: MDV – a Markdown superset for docs, dashboards, and slides with data

Markdown is a beautiful demonstration that document structure syntax can/should be simple. What most people do in Word is better done by just adjusting the document rendering/style, not the document structure...

I love the idea of extending markdown to include more visual elements, but if you're not careful you just reinvent HTML.

Here's my personal take on extending table syntax for charts. Easy to write, and if a renderer/parser understands the syntax you get a beautiful chart, and if it doesn't you get a table with slightly weird headings:

  | Month::x | Revenue::y1 | Cost::y2 |
  | -------- | ----------: | -------: |
  | Jan      | $82,000     | $51,000 |
  | Feb      | $91,000     | $56,000 |
  | Mar      | $95,000     | $58,000 |

Looks cool.

I continue to love Markdown and always push it a bit further than Commonmark, with frontmatter, schemas, code fence metadata too.

I've been enjoying https://djot.net/ as a superset of Markdown that is feels very well designed and extensible too.

You may look into its syntax and tooling for prior art or some extra lift.

I'm trying to get a djot extension in Zed for syntax highlighting if anyone minds adding a to help signal some community interest.

https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions/pull/5206

I'm starting to wonder if someone is selling 'open source CV booster' packages to executives looking to jump ship. This is obviously vibe-coded with Claude, has a broken link to `/superpowers` which indicates no human has read the README before publishing.

The profile seems to be a real person, CEO/CTO level of a small/medium company, but with zero history of OSS contributions, publishing anything or social media presence. It's the third project of this kind to show up in HN this week.

I work on a dashboarding / BI solution that is also built around markdown and clickhouse. www.evidence.dev

We moved to stripe's Markdoc variant for the component syntax last year and have been really happy with it. Models are good at writing it, people are good at reviewing it.

Here's an area chart that would issue a SQL query for weekly revenue totals:

``` {% area_chart data="my_table" x="date" y="sum(revenue)" date_grain="week" /%} ```

This is cool. Can you tell me more about the :: blocks thing. I didn’t know that was a Markdown element.

This problem has risen to the top of many people’s minds at this moment (including mine!). My Show HN for a similar cli + web based solution (https://sdocs.dev) is on the /show page now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633).

I also went with Front Matter for styling and added an interactive styling mode you can do on the web to test it out immediately. There are some examples on my homepage which demonstrate it in action.

SDocs is cli -> instantly rendered on web

Despite being in the browser, the content of SDocs rendered Markdown files remain local to you. SDoc urls contain your markdown document's content in compressed base64 in the url fragment (the bit after the `#`): https://sdocs.dev/#md=GzcFAMT...(this is the contents of your document)... The url fragment is never sent to the server (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Reference/F...: "The fragment is not sent to the server when the URI is requested; it is processed by the client").

The sdocs.dev webapp is purely a client side decoding and rendering engine for the content stored in the url fragment.

This also means you can share your .md files privately by sharing the url.

Also, I’m sorry I high jacked your post to some degree with this comment. It’s just a little too relevant for me not to leave a comment!

All of these are supported in pandoc markdown:

> .mdv is strict CommonMark plus four additions:

> YAML front-matter for title, theme, named styles, and dataset references.

> Fenced blocks for data/visuals: ```chart type=bar x=region y=sales.

> ::: containers for styled regions and layout: ::: callout / ::: columns.

> ::: toc for an auto-generated table of contents.

I was expecting to find a link to a github pages site where I can see the rendered examples, but only found a link to the html sources in examples/out. Am I missing something?

Funny to see this approach trending! I published this a month ago.

https://wire.wise-relations.com/guides/components/

my takeaway:

- add lint or errors, otherwise your formatting will break, e.g. LLMs and humans will add text too long or too short and your design system will not be able to handle this.

- it's great for low token input

- validate the layout of the user vs. the components used.

- seen here before: https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/syntax/optional...