Semantics

Front Matter

Aubade supports a minimal subset of YAML syntax for the front matter, which is semantically placed at the start of the file between two --- lines, and it will be parsed as a JSON object.

All values will be attempted to be parsed into the supported types, which are null, true, and false. Any other values will go through the following checks and the first one to pass will be used.

• Comments, #; indicated by a hash followed by the value, will be omitted from the output
• Literal Block, |; indicated by a pipe followed by a newline and the value, will be parsed as multi-line string
• Inline Array, [x, y, 2]; indicated by comma-separated values surrounded by square brackets, can only be primitives
• Sequence, - x; indicated by a dash followed by a space and the value, this can contain nested maps and sequences

To have a line be parsed as-is, simply wrap the value with single or double quotes.

	

		

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---
title: My First Blog Post, Hello World!
description: Welcome to my first post.
tags: [blog, life, coding]
date:published: 2021-04-01
date:updated: 2021-04-13

# do not assign top-level data when using compressed nested properties syntax
# because this will overwrite previous 'date:published' and 'date:updated'
# date: ...
---

The above front matter will output the following JSON object…

	

		

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{
	"title": "My First Blog Post, Hello World!",
	"description": "Welcome to my first post.",
	"tags": ["blog", "life", "coding"],
	"date": {
		"published": "2021-04-01",
		"updated": "2021-04-03"
	}
}

Where we usually use indentation to represent the start of a nested maps, we can additionally denote them using a compressed syntax by combining the properties into one key separated by a colon without space, such as key:x: value. This should only be declared at the top-level and not inside nested maps.

Body

Everything after front matter will be considered as the body and will be parsed as markdown. You can use the !{} syntax to access the metadata from the front matter.

	

		

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---
title: "My Amazing Series: Second Coming"
tags: [blog, life, coding]
date:
  published: 2021-04-01
  updated: 2021-04-13
---

# the properties above will result to
#
# title = 'My Amazing Series: Second Coming'
# tags = ['blog', 'life', 'coding']
# date = {
#   published: '2021-04-01',
#   updated: '2021-04-13',
# }
#
# these can be accessed with !{}

# !{tags:0} - accessing tags array at index 0
This article's main topic will be about !{tags:0}

# !{date:property} - accessing property of date
This article was originally published on !{date:published}
Thoroughly updated through this website on !{date:updated}

There should only be one <h1> heading per page, and it’s usually declared in the front matter as title, which is why headings in the body starts at 2 ## (equivalent to <h2>) with the lowest one being 4 #### (equivalent to <h4>) and should conform with the rules of markdownlint, with some essential ones to follow are

• MD001: Heading levels should only increment by one level at a time
• MD003: Heading style; only ATX style
• MD018: No space after hash on atx style heading
• MD023: Headings must start at the beginning of the line
• MD024: Multiple headings with the same content; siblings only
• MD042: No empty links

Generated ids can be specified from the text by wrapping them in $(...) as the delimiter. The text inside will be converted to kebab-case and will be used as the id. If no delimiter is detected, the whole text will be used.

If you’re using VSCode, you can install the markdownlint extension to help you catch these lint errors / warnings and write better markdown. These rules can be configured, see the .jsonc template and .yaml template with an example here.

Code Blocks

Code blocks are fenced with 3 backticks and can optionally be assigned a language for syntax highlighting. The language must be a valid shiki supported language and is case-insensitive.

	

		

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```language
// code
```

Additional information can be added to the code block through data attributes, accessible via data-[key]="[value]". The dataset can be specified from any line within the code block using #$ key: value syntax, and it will be omitted from the output. The key-value pair should roughly conform to the data-* rules, meaning key can only contain alphanumeric characters and hyphens, while value can be any string that fits in the data attribute value.

There are some special keys that will be used to modify the code block itself, and they are

• #$ file: string | add a filename to the code block that will be shown above the output
• #$ line-start: number | define the starting line number of the code block