Beyond Data Fetching with RSCs

Frontend First

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

Links:

• Markdoc
• Shiki