Parse MyST Markdown using Remark

[mettekou]

Proposal

I've been an avid user of MyST Markdown and greatly appreciate the work you've done to enhance scientific writing. I believe you're always looking for ways to enhance MyST Markdown's capabilities. Have you considered the potential benefits of switching from markdown-it to Remark? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Would you be open to exploring how Remark could potentially benefit MyST Markdown?

[choldgraf]

Thanks for the suggestion - this would require discussion and research before making any kinds of decisions, so I suspect it will be some time before folks get to this because of the limited developer / maintainer capacity on the project. You could certainly write a MyST parser that uses Remark - so a nice starting point might be to implement something and show it off to see how it would be more beneficial than markdown-it (or potentially maintained as a parallel community effort).

[rowanc1]

Thanks for the suggestion @mettekou -- this is something we have thought about a lot, and agree that there are a ton of benefits to enabling this direction. We have done a few prototypes and really like using unified for the parser. There is some history to why we are using markdown-it, as well as a few benefits to having that parser for the vscode ecosystem. However, unified gives column positioning and is how we are doing the rest of the transforms and plugins after parsing is complete. The unified and remark ecosystem is also a bit larger for other types of plugins (e.g. mdx).

I am hoping that we get to this, at least in an experiment, in the next several months. Any help/encouragement via use cases that you could provide @mettekou in that direction would be greatly appreciated! 🚀

@choldgraf I don't think that we would necessarily give up on the markdown-it parser, but having the unified parser that is compatible with remark does open up a lot of possibilities, especially for enabling javascript developers. Perhaps @mettekou can give some more details as to the use case you are thinking about?