MarkdownMesh

MarkdownMesh is a not-for-profit mission for Markdown.

Tech goals include creating and maintaining:

a Markdown engine (command-line tool + library + text editor extensions) that is simple, secure, extensible, observable, free/libre, and blazingly fast
a collection of similarly-adjective'd Markdown plugins/extensions — both by creating new plugins and by reviewing / summarizing / optimizing / Zig-porting existing ones

Other goals include:

helping more people learn more about Markdown and available tools
helping notes connect with each other and with people

Command-line tool


     cat foo.md | mm html-fragment > foo.html
     cat foo.md | mm html-page     > foo.html
     cat foo.md | mm ast-json      > foo.json
zip -0 -r - md/ | mm zip2zip       > website-build.zip
        cd md/ && mm live-preview

Language extensions

I consider the CommonMark+GFM Spec to be the primary definition of Markdown today.

Any further language extensions are off by default in this engine, but you can opt into them via plugins, e.g.

Plugin	Example	Result
`math`	$S_1 \cap S_2$
`footnotes`	`…[^foo].` … `[^foo]: …`
`mdx-subset`	`<SomeWidget … />`
`import-markdown`	`!![](../foo.md#bar):firstP`	Inline a copy of the first paragraph of section Bar from doc Foo
`import-code`	`!![](../src/code.py#foo)`	Inline a copy of the function definition `foo` from `code.py` as a `CodeBlock` whose `info_string` is `py`

Plugins

Creating plugins (in Python or Zig)
Authz beyond the WASM sandbox
(off by default, very-specific authz scopes)

List of plugins:

...for importing (Markdown, code…)
...for code (styling, lang/meta for inlines…)
...for external tooling
(clip via IIIF, render/run/viz code…)
...for language exts (footnotes, math…)
...for metadata
(including full semantic annotation)
...for other web stuff
(MDX, assets, templates…)
...for social (RSS, og:* previews…)
...for Unicode
...for validation / static analysis
...for tables of contents / search indexes
...for polyfilling various things that I wish browsers already had available for JavaScript-less use

Concepts


Doc	One Markdown document.
Docset	A set of Docs, e.g. from folders or .zip files of `.md` files, optionally filtered to a subset of those Docs and a subset of content within those Docs.
Section	A subset of a Doc that contains a Heading followed by the content associated with it (including subsections).
Post	You can consider some Docs or Sections to be "Post"s. This concept is relevant only for some post-related plugins, e.g. rss, signatures, etc.
Syntax tree	a.k.a. "AST", — this is a tree of Elements that code gets parsed to.
Element	For Markdown code, syntax tree elements include Link, CodeBlock, etc.

Engine status