This is really useful, thanks!

Is there a subset of markdown (preferably with an implementation in Javascript to render it as HTML) that's limited to just the basic stuff like bold, underline, italics, links, quotes, and code elements? I don't need images, headers, html tags, tables, horizontal lines and the rest.

It's not so much about the restrictions I'm worried about. My research has shown that showdownjs is one of the lightest (~30kB) markdown to HTML rendering libraries in JS, but 30kB is still too large for my application. I would trade the above mentioned features for a smaller file size.

Any suggestions? I know that I can probably write my own implementation, but I'd rather rely on battle-tested libraries instead of rolling out my own.

Why not use one of the pleorhora of static markdown renderers and serve vanilla HTML if you're the bandwidth constrained?

It has to be dynamically generated because I don't control the content. Also, having the markdown makes it easier to edit and update.

Maybe I should look into serving both the markdown AND the HTML.

Nice work!!

I just noticed but there’s an unfortunate naming collision in this space. “Remark” mentioned in the article is a presentation generator [1].

The name also refers to a very awesome, pluggable framework for processing markdown text [2].

I don’t know if they’re related but that’s very confusing.

1 - https://github.com/gnab/remark

2 - http://remark.js.org

Thanks for doing this.

It would be great if there was an explainer that simply had comparisons between different flares of MD - e.g Github flavoured. We are working on an open source project with 80k words in MD at the moment an the small syntax stuff is a nightmare.

Thanks for the suggestion. I agree with you! I've started working on something similar to what you've described, but it's going to take me some time -- it's an enormous undertaking.

In the meantime, you might want to check out this tool: http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2

Thanks that would be really really helpful. We deal with all kinds of volunteer translators and are always having trouble and mess ups because of it. Having somewhere to point them to would be great!

Also thanks for the tool. Great suggestion!

Thanks, I submitted a PR. https://github.com/mattcone/markdown-guide/pull/13

Thanks! I've merged it.

thank you for putting this together