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 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" /%} ```

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.

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?

With modern editors `<h2>foo<h2>` is one keystroke more than `## foo`. Might as well tap into the React ecosystem (I love Vue BTW) and get module-organization and DRY, live preview, syntax highlighting, autocomplete, linting, AI expertise etc.

There are tools to edit PPTs and movies with React.

https://wyozi.github.io/react-pptx/ https://www.remotion.dev/

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...

The only reason to use markdown is that you can read it and write it in a text editor unaware of syntax and rendering semantics. When this purpose is lost and your UX or reading or writing a document starts depending on renderer and your knowledge of how it works, the result becomes just another rich document format, where editor abstraction is a must. And then why all this is even needed? ODF does the job well.

Nice project. But at what point does Markdown just become Emacs Org-Mode? At least with Emacs you can write Lisp to make your document do anything you want.

The table syntax extension in the top comment is interesting — it solves the readability problem without breaking unrendered markdown. The ::y1 approach degrades gracefully. One thing I keep running into with these markdown supersets: the rendering gap. You write locally, push somewhere, and suddenly the :::columns block is just raw text. Marp handles this well because the VSCode plugin closes that loop immediately. Curious how MDV handles the renderer portability problem — is the spec open enough that editors could pick it up, or does it depend on the MDV CLI being in the chain?

I'm using quarto for this sort of thing.

Good ideas. I am working on something similar but with a tiered complexity to fallback to html for complex use cases : https://github.com/livetemplate/tinkerdown, https://github.com/livetemplate/tinkerdown/blob/main/docs/gu...

This seems cool. For going from Markdown to slides I’ve often used Marp: https://marp.app/ — It doesn’t require much specialized syntax, it mostly does the right thing to turn plain Markdown sections into slides. Simple self-hostable HTML output and PDF export options. Already has a VSCode preview plugin, too. I noticed that Claude Code is able to generate Marp slides for you if you ask it, as well.

Best for slides that are just bullet points, full-slide images, and code. Especially code. Less good if you have a lot of images or need to do your own styles or layout.

Very cool.

I’m a product designer, and I could totally see this fitting into my workflow for design briefs, strategy, review, and crit docs. Markdown is too simple, and Figma is too visual. This feels like a great middle ground.

I like how markdown has now become a trend - would be interesting to see how this tool matures !

PS : Even I built an API tool on markdown - https://voiden.md.

Always find it funny that software developers are stuck in the 1980's when it comes to making documents. Meanwhile normal people use programs to point and click with the new-fangled technology called "a mouse", and create richer documents that convey more information easier, and they do it faster. I guess when you get paid to write in code, it only makes sense to write more code.

Looks wonderful, is there a skill or prompt that can teach agents how to use this format?

wow, I didn't know that, and I;m using markdown daily. thx!

there's so many of these now lol. what made you go with this over just extending mdx? also how do you handle escape when the expression body has * or # in it

Frontmatter should now be in the markdown standard.

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