Markup

Mendoza Markup

Mendoza markup is used to create the main content of your pages. It is mostly plain-text that is read by mendoza, transformed into a document tree, and then rendered to the final HTML for presentation.

Front Matter

All mendoza markup files must contain some front matter. The front provides basic metadata for the document, parameters for templating, and whatever Janet code you want to execute for side effects. The front matter is just Janet source code and continues up until the ---. The last value in the front matter should be a table or struct, and will be merged into the root node of the final document tree.

Example:

{:title "My Blog Post"
 :description "Mendoza is a new static site generator!"
 :template "main.html"}
# End of front matter
---
# Markup here...

Basic Syntax

Paragraphs

After the front matter, the basic syntax of Mendoza markup is pretty simple. Blocks of plain text separated by blank lines become paragraphs. Mendoza supports UTF-8, so there is no need to escape characters. To escape a byte, use a backslash followed by the byte.

Headers

Simple, markdown like headers occur at the beginning of a line. They are formed by 1 to 6 # characters in a line, followed by the header title.

Macros

For all other markup, Mendoza requires the use of macros. Headers and paragraphs can be specified with macros as well, but there is direct syntactic support for these because they are so common.

Macros correspond to Janet functions, which will evaluate the arguments and return a DOM node to be inserted into the document. You can call normal Janet functions in the code, as well other functions defined in the macro environment. Macro calls begin with a @ character, followed by the name of the macro.

For example:

This is some @green-thing text

In this case @green-thing is not a real macro, but if it were, the value of (green-thing) from Janet would be spliced into the DOM.

We can also pass arguments to macros in several ways.

• Raw janet arguments: @green-thing(1 true nil) will be transformed to (green-thing 1 true nil)
• Raw string: @green-thing[1 true nil] will be transformed to (green-thing "1 true nil")
• Sub document: @green-thing{More stuff @bold[here]} will be transformed to (green-thing ["More stuff " {:tag "bold" :content "here"}]) (or something similar).
• Some other ways to pass raw strings: @mymac`a string`, @mymac"a string"

You can also put different kinds of arguments together for expresive macros. For example, the @codeblock macro can be used with this technique to great effect.

@codeblock[janet]```
(+ 1 2 3)
```

The codeblock macro takes two string arguments, where the first specifies the language to use for highlighting, and the second is the code to format, which is given as a Janet multi-line backtick string. You could also write

@codeblock[janet][(+ 1 2 3)]

as both forms pass two strings to the codeblock macro.