Writing an attributes extension

[gregives]

I've been using markdown-it and markdown-it-attrs to render Markdown but it has a very large bundle size.

I started writing an extension for micromark to handle attributes similarly but I'm not sure it's possible.

[Link to example website](example.com){data-attribute="something"}

Given that a link's attributes are hard-coded, is it impossible to create an extension to support the above syntax?

[wooorm]

I generally believe adding extensions is a bad thing.
Directives are somewhat standardized: https://github.com/micromark/micromark-extension-directive. Most parsers support them. Could you use those?

[gregives]

I had a play around with directives but I couldn't find a way to add an attribute to a link element directly?

[wooorm]

That is correct, but they are more powerful: you can allow any component: :ComponentName[text]{attributes}, which could be :a[text]{href=whatever}, where you define an a component in code to generate an <a> element

[gregives]

Ah that's a good idea, I didn't think of using a directive to actually render the link! Thank you very much for your help, and thanks for all your work on micromark 😄

[wooorm]

They solve components in markdown. It’s thinking a bit different, but they are very powerful.
And alternatively: you can also use HTML! <a href...></a>. That works in most places too!
And thanks for the kind works!