Thoughts about handling frontmatter?

[hxlnt]

I've been integrating Quarkdown with some other Markdown tools lately, and one thing I haven't figured out is how to include YAML frontmatter that other tools require without Quarkdown printing it. Normally, I'd just wrap it in a Quarkdown function*, but frontmatter seems to only be recognized when --- is the first line, so putting it in a function breaks that.

I didn't log this as a feature request because I'm not sure if Quarkdown should play nice with YAML frontmatter or if it's out of scope for the spirit of the project. Interested to hear thoughts on this or if others have successfully or unsuccessfully worked with Quarkdown + YAML frontmatter in blended .qd/.md environments.

---

* For example, this is how I have other Markdown tools pick up #tags without printing them to the page:

.tagged { #2010s #video-synth #music-visualizer #schematic }

then in a parent file:

.function {tagged}
    one two? three? four? five? six? seven? eight? nine? ten? eleven? twelve? thirteen?:

(lol)

[iamgio]

Quarkdown doesn't support frontmatters and likely won't. In fact, I dislike them: Quarkdown was born to break free from that rigid schema, thanks to functions like .docname, .docauthors and other metadata functions.

I was already planning on enhancing metadata support in v1.13, with support to keywords, icon, and other SEO details. That was mainly because I want to make a new static version of my own personal website, and noticed Quarkdown's output is not 100% ready to be just thrown onto a webserver.

Unfortunately, development in the last few weeks has been particularly slow due to my relocation. I'm settling now so I'm hopeful I'll start working on that soon enough :)

[iamgio]

Well, in your .tagged function, you just need a single function parameter. You'd need multiple parameters if you were to do .tagged {#tag1} {#tag2} {#tag3}, but .tagged {#tag1 #tag2 #tag3} uses just one parameter.

[hxlnt]

Ah, I should clarify: I'm not interested in Quarkdown parsing YAML frontmatter, and I do intend to use the native metadata features that you mention. I'm only wondering if it would be possible for Quarkdown to ignore YAML frontmatter (i.e., not literally print the frontmatter as if it's page content). A check might do something like "if the first line of the file is only --- and there's another only---- line later, consider it YAML frontmatter and don't render it." One real use case would be integrating Quarkdown files in Foam, which uses a specific YAML metadata field to generate graph filters. Another would be for allowing Quarkdown to .include Markdown files from a static-site generator like 11ty or hugo that depends on certain YAML fields.

Thanks for the hint on the .tagged function--much easier!

Good luck on the move! Take your time; repos will still be here when you get back. :)

[iamgio]

Ah I see now. That can be a feature, though low-priority for now. Going to open an issue later :)