marked v13's token renderer

[emmercm]

Unfortunately marked changed the function signatures on the renderer object.

I have some code to alter renderer behavior:

import {marked} from 'marked';
const markdownRenderer = new marked.Renderer();
markdownRenderer.heading = (text, level, raw) => {
    // ... 
};
markdownRenderer.table = (header, body) => {
    // ...
};
markdownRenderer.code = (_code, infostring, escaped) => {
    // ...
};

and then I provide that renderer like this:

import markdown from '@metalsmith/markdown';
Metalsmith(path.resolve())
    // ...
    .use(markdown({
        renderer: markdownRenderer
    }))
    // ...

markedjs/marked#3291 made it so renderers created with marked v13+ code are incompatible with <v13 versions of marked, and this plugin's version is quite old.

---

Maybe a warning about compatible versions of marked would suffice? I suspect this plugin's version of marked is being held back intentionally based on #70.

An eventual major upgrade of this plugin might be nice, and I'm sure you had other items for its roadmap.

[webketje]

I attempted to update this plugin a year ago and got into contact with the newer maintainer of marked to address issues with the release process and the new extensions ecosystem: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Amarkedjs+type%3Aissue+commenter%3Awebketje&type=issues.

It became clear to me that we are totally at odds about how an open-source project should be managed, see a.o. markedjs/marked#3186 (comment). Metalsmith as a project with regard for backward-compatibility and stability cannot rely on a core plugin that breaks as frequently as bot-automated marked + extension releases. I attempted an upgrade but there were just too many incompatibilities and open questions: https://github.com/metalsmith/markdown/commits/release/2.x. I did a deeper dive in some of the marked extensions and found that for ex the smartypants dependency used has code of dubious quality.

For these reasons I concluded it would be better to switch to an alternative dependency, and stuck with https://github.com/remarkjs/remark, for which I also started work at https://github.com/metalsmith/markdown/commits/poc/remark. Remark can do much more than just markdown, including MDX. I discontinued work on this after 2 hard drive crashes made me lose local progress and I had to focus on home renovations.

[emmercm]

@webketje this was a very thoughtful answer, thank you. I agree with your viewpoint on breaking changes.

Maybe it could be worth a quick README note about this plugin only being compatible with <v13. I'm totally fine with keeping my versions held back.