Markdoc

I’ve long heard from friends that Stripe’s developer documentation is not just excellent, but perhaps the best developer documentation in the world. They do all sorts of neat things to help developers, like putting your API key into snippets you copy from the website. Clever. It’s also just a great looking website with good navigation.

Markdoc is Stripe’s own content authoring system, implementing a rich superset of Markdown, and released this week as an open source project. It looks wonderful. I love their syntax extensions — very true to the spirit of Markdown. They use curly braces for their extensions; I’m not sure I ever made this clear, publicly, but I avoided using curly braces in Markdown itself — even though they are very tempting characters — to unofficially reserve them for implementation-specific extensions. Markdoc’s extensive use of curly braces for its syntax is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about.

The Markdoc site itself is, of course, splendidly documented and fun to play with. You can try it out right in their example dingus on the homepage.

Warms my heart to see Markdown continuing to grow like this.

★ Thursday, 19 May 2022