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> but it represents some amount of lock-in (though, less than typical since the everything is mostly plain markdown) This is an important point. Retype has been developed with the explicit goal of preventing lock-in. For better or worse, I'm not sure, but the point of the app is that you are not locked-in by design. You 100% control the original source of all your data and that data is being stored in the absolute simplest of forms being just static text files. Your data is not squirrelled away in a proprietary app, or sass service, or spread across tables in some database. Sure, you (or whomever) might be skilled enough to extract that data back out of the database, but that scenario is certainly the exception, and certainly will never ever be as simple as just plain text files stored in a folder. In the future, you might decide Retype is not for you, or a better system comes around, no problem. You control ALL the data. Just switch to a different generator. There's no exporting data out of some system and hoping you fetch everything, assuming you can even get the data cleanly out of a system. Even gitbook is not that clean. You can mostly export your content out of gitbook, but that does include everything. They give your content back, although that is not enough to recreate the site with configuration. Yes, there are a handful of Retype specific Markdown components that enable convenient UI components such as Tabs, Panels, and Buttons, but... those exist in all static site generators and Retype has by far implemented the cleanest syntax solution. That solution, by design, is also the easiest to port away from. Maybe the system you move to in the future does not support the exact same syntax, but it will be trivial to port from the Retype syntax to another. For instance, compare the Retype Tab component syntax (https://retype.com/components/tab/) to docusaurus (https://docusaurus.io/docs/markdown-features/tabs), which is actually relatively clean compared to the mess that gets exported from gitbook. BTW, Retype 100% supports the block of Tab code exported by gitbook, so your site will "just work" without being required to do any cleanup of their exported syntax. I would love to add many more components to Retype. It would be trivial to do, but I explicitly do not because I want to try and avoid vendor lock-in. If a better system comes around in the future, even I want to be able to port my project as easily as possible. |
The Docusaurus tabs use MDX, it's not a custom syntax for tabs, it's a powerful low-level way to use React or frontend interactive components in markdown, and likely to become more and more widespread (so hopefully portable and yet very powerful)
It's also possible to implement tabs with Rehype syntax in Docusaurus in user land thanks to a Remark plugin, so portability remains possible but not free.
At the end of the day, md is not the most powerful out of the box and it's difficult to ship something meaningful without any extension