remark@next (13)

[wooorm]

Hi!

remark is switching to a new parser (and compiler) internally (micromark, remarkjs/remark#536), which will break several of these plugins.
Several of the remark plugins, such as frontmatter, footnotes, math, a new remark-gfm, and a couple others, will update soon too.
Those might server well as inspiration on how to tokenize with micromark in remark. There are several micromark extensions already as well (which deal with tokenizing markdown), and corresponding mdast extensions, which deal with mapping those tokens to mdast.

Anyway, feel free to ask me questions!

[StaloneLab]

Thanks a lot for having taken time to inform us on this issue.

I'll experiment with micromark in the upcoming weeks, and ask you if I have any questions.

[vladar]

Any thoughts on remark 13 support? I am interested in upgrading remark-custom-blocks plugin, so can prepare a PR if you are looking for help. But not sure if we can bump only one plugin or do we have to update all at once?

[StaloneLab]

We are planning to update them all at once, but the migration should start fairly soon. In fact, I already started working on it for some plugins (but not remark-custom-blocks). If you are interested in working on remark-custom-blocks, I'd would be happy to accept the pull request, and can arrange to publish a version without problem. Please note however that this will require significant structural changes; here are my current thoughts on how we are going to do it:

• publish a new package micromark-extension-custom-blocks, that will in the end contain both a micromark tokenizer (lib/index.js) and an HTML serializer;
• update the current remark-custom-blocks to use the tokenizer mentioned above, and render an AST similar to the one we generate today.

In fact, I'm planning to initialize a specific branch for working on micromark plugins. The best you can do is maybe to wait for it to get created as it will provide an plugin example (micromark-extension-kbd). I can arrange to do it next week, so stay tuned, I'll post here when it's done. You can also of course start working on it by now, and we will integrate it after. There is a great margin on what we can do as the migration is just getting started.

[vladar]

Thanks for the update! 👍 I was hoping the migration will be easy 😅 But happy to try anyway when your micromark extensions are ready as you suggest.

[StaloneLab]

Quick update: a plugin was migrated today, remark-kbd. It took longer than expected and still have some problems, but I plan to solve them later.

If you feel confident enough, then technically, you can do the same as I did with this first plugin:

• write a micromark extension, the most complicated part, especially considering that remark-custom-block is a block element, making it more difficult to handle than an inline one such as remark-kbd;
• rewrite the existing remark plugin to use the micromark extension, and add support for the AST.

If you feel like waiting more isn't a big deal, then I'm writing a guide to porting our extensions (and more generally, to writing extensions) for micromark, that may help you get started. If you've never written any plugin for the new parser, then maybe waiting for this guide will help, but if you're experienced enough, our codebase is technically completely ready for micromark on the branch next, and I would be happy to accept your PR! 🙂