Sam talks to Ryan about refactoring an MDX blog post to a React Server Component. They discuss how RSC’s ability to render server-side content with “client-side holes” turns out to replace MDX for many uses cases. They also talk about other tools that are (surprisingly) a conceptual subset of the RSC architecture, such as custom Webpack loaders.
Topics include:
- 0:00 - Intro
- 5:05 - The Next.js happy path for MDX: Local files
- 11:15 - Exploring remote MDX content with mdx-remote
- 14:46 - Separating the serializable parts of MDX from the runtime imports
- 17:13 - Realizing that RSC covers the same problem space, and ditching MDX
- 26:50 - Exploring other APIs and plugin ecosystems that RSC could replace: Webpack loaders, next/image, and Liquid templates
- 32:11 - React’s vision for RSCs
- 35:18 - How RSCs could replace build-time plugin APIs
- 44:51 - Replacing MDX with Markdoc, Shiki, and custom node code during render
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