Change Request: Support `MarkdownSourceCode#comments` as other language plugins do

[lumirlumir]

Environment

ESLint version: HEAD
@eslint/markdown version: HEAD
Node version: 24.18.0
npm version: 11.16.0
Operating System: Windows

What problem do you want to solve?

Coming from the community plugin thread eslint-community/eslint-plugin-eslint-comments#267 (comment), which discusses adding MarkdownSourceCode#comments to the Markdown plugin.

Currently, JavaScript, JSON, and CSS provide a direct way to access comment information through their respective XXXSourceCode classes.

For example, JavaScript has SourceCode#getAllComments, JSON has JSONSourceCode#comments, and CSS has CSSSourceCode#comments to provide direct access to comment information.

• https://eslint.org/docs/latest/extend/custom-rules#accessing-the-source-code
• https://github.com/eslint/css/blob/main/src/languages/css-source-code.js#L95-L99
• https://github.com/eslint/json/blob/main/src/languages/json-source-code.js#L126-L129

However, Markdown does not currently provide a way to directly access comment information through MarkdownSourceCode.

This makes it difficult for language-agnostic rule authors - who create rules that apply to all languages or a subset of them - to write rules related to comments, since there is no consistent way to retrieve comment information.

Therefore, I’d like to suggest adding MarkdownSourceCode#comments, as other language plugins do.

What do you think is the correct solution?

We already have logic to extract HTML comments, but it currently only handles eslint-xxx inline configuration comments:

markdown/src/language/markdown-source-code.js

Line 72 in 186ad3e

function extractInlineConfigCommentsFromHTML(node, sourceCode) {

We could extend this logic to extract all HTML comments, including non-eslint-xxx inline configuration comments, and store that information.

Participation

• I am willing to submit a pull request for this change.

AI acknowledgment

• I did not use AI to generate this issue report.
• (If the above is not checked) I have reviewed the AI-generated content before submitting.

Additional comments

For performance, I think we could also consider implementing it as a lazy getter, similar to XXXSourceCode#lines in rewrite:

https://github.com/eslint/rewrite/blob/main/packages/plugin-kit/src/source-code.js#L632-L636

[lumirlumir]

Could I hear some opinions on it? @eslint/eslint-tsc

[nzakas]

Markdown doesn't really have a concept of comments, so I'm not sure if it makes sense to expose this officially. We use the HTML comments for config purposes, but I'm unsure if we should consider all HTML comments as Markdown comments. Definitely would like some more thoughts on this.