What is Markdown?
There are multiple implementations of the language (such as Github flavored Markdown) and each of these implementations have some own improvements. These Markdown Editor let you write and edit markup documents. Use these markdown editor freeware to convert markdown to HTML and PDF.
It’s a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet.
Who created Markdown?
It was developed in 2004 by John Gruber in collaboration with Aaron Swartz. Gruber wrote the first markdown-to-html converter in Perl, and it soon became widely used in websites. By 2014 there were dozens of implementations in many languages.
Why is CommonMark needed?
John Gruber’s canonical description of Markdown’s syntax does not specify the syntax unambiguously.
In the absence of a spec, early implementers consulted the original Markdown.pl code to resolve these ambiguities. But Markdown.pl was quite buggy, and gave manifestly bad results in many cases, so it was not a satisfactory replacement for a spec. Markdown.pl was last updated December 17th, 2004.
Because there is no unambiguous spec, implementations have diverged considerably over the last 10 years. As a result, users are often surprised to find that a document that renders one way on one system (say, a GitHub wiki) renders differently on another (say, converting to docbook using Pandoc). To make matters worse, because nothing in Markdown counts as a “syntax error,” the divergence often isn’t discovered right away.
There’s no standard test suite for Markdown; MDTest is the closest thing we have. The only way to resolve Markdown ambiguities and inconsistencies is Babelmark, which compares the output of 20+ implementations of Markdown against each other to see if a consensus emerges.
We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification. We believe this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown.
That’s what we call CommonMark.
Who are you?
We’re a group of Markdown fans who either work at companies with industrial scale deployments of Markdown, have written Markdown parsers, have extensive experience supporting Markdown with end users – or all of the above.
- John MacFarlane, jgm@berkeley.edu
- David Greenspan
- Vicent Marti, vicent@github.com
- Neil Williams, neil@reddit.com
- Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe
- Jeff Atwood, jatwood@codinghorror.com
How can I help?
Exercise our reference implementations, or find a community implementation in your preferred environment or language. Provide feedback!
If a CommonMark implementation does not already exist in your preferred environment or language, try implementing your own CommonMark parser. One of our major goals is to strongly specify Markdown, and to eliminate the many old inconsistencies and ambiguities that made using Markdown so difficult. Did we succeed?
Where can I find it?
spec.commonmark.org
The CommonMark specification.
code.commonmark.org
Reference implementation and validation test suite on GitHub.
talk.commonmark.org
Public discussion area and mailing list via Discourse.
commonmark.org/help
Quick reference card and interactive tutorial for learning Markdown.
spec.commonmark.org/dingus/
Live testing tool powered by the reference implementation.
When is the spec final?
The current version of the CommonMark spec is quite robust after many years of public feedback.
There are currently CommonMark implementations for dozens of programming languages, and the following sites and projects have adopted CommonMark:
- Discourse
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Qt
- Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange
- Swift
Table To Markdown
One of my biggest mistakes with this blog was not finding a WordPress plugin that would allow me to write my posts with markdown; to this day I still need to write posts in 'Visual' mode and then manually convert the post to HTML for 'Text' mode. One of these days I want to convert existing posts to Markdown and then enable a plugin that will convert Markdown to HTML. This painful process made me ask myself: is there a way I can use Node.js JavaScript to convert HTML to Markdown? There is, and it's called Turndown by Dom Christie.
Convert HTML to Markdown with Node.jsStart by installing Turndown:
Then use Turndown's simple API to convert HTML to markdown:
You can use the interactive Turndown demo to experiment with its capabilities. Turndown has a number of options and allows you to use filters to keep elements you believe could be at risk for improper conversion.
To-markdown Npm
Most developers look for a Markdown to HTML solution so it's rate to find myself in a position to need to convert HTML to Markdown. I look forward to migrating my site's content to Markdown so that writing posts is much less stressful in the future!