Zato VS commonmark-spec

Yes, the article is correct, there is a market for Markdown sites and related products.

Our Zato website is in Markdown: https://zato.io

We have a purpose-built static site generator, which makes sense in our case because:

* The resulting site is very fast, seeing as there is no need for runtime generation of any assets / HTML / any kind of resources

* It is easier for developers to work on documentation because they already know Markdown

* It is easy to statically apply filters such as spell checkers for multiple languages during the build

* Various optimizations can be applied, e.g. incremental builds or on-demand builds

The drawbacks are:

* Non-technical translators may have a difficult time working with anything but either their own specialized tools or MS Word and they consider Markdown to be "advanced"

* Sometimes you work with writers who are not technical at all and who will not understand what a build system is even if they are open to the idea of learning Markdown itself

Thus, there is a market for a lightweight CMS that would enable non-technical people to author Markdown in their browsers, without a need for any command line usage.

Edit: this is because GitHub uses cmark-gfm, which is a fork of cmark, which implements the CommonMark variant of markdown. Looks like CommonMark still doesn't support definition lists. :(

BookStack dev here. There's no specific "import" option but you can use the Markdown editor in BookStack and paste in your Markdown content there. The API is essentially just an endpoint to accept the same kind of data, for of course you could automate against the API for batch import. One thing to keep in mind is that BookStack markdown support is fairly tightly scoped to (commonmark + tables + tasklists), although HTML within MD is supported.

>A single canonical reference

https://commonmark.org/

Typically with major new releases of software, when the number left of the dot (e.g. 2.0) increases, it’s shipped as a separate product. Not always, but generally. The Bear folks can speak for themselves but IIRC a lot of the code was refactored / rewritten to support, for example, CommonMark. So, under the hood, it’s literally brand new in some respects.

I use Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) for a lot of things, including my RPG stuff, and there are options for exporting things as PDFs. It’s great for getting organized and doing research, but I would use other tools for long-form writing and layout. What I like about Obsidian though is that everything is done in Markdown (https://commonmark.org) and I can use Pandoc (https://pandoc.org) to transform the source to whatever I need. The caveat is that Obsidian uses a flavor of Markdown with some non-standard extensions, so a pure Markdown editor like Typora (https://typora.io) might be a better choice depending on your needs.

yes, this is the "inventor" of markdown and those rules will always work. Hugo uses something called "Commonmark" which is developed on top of the original markdown. But the original rules will always work too.

Reddit and many other sites support Markdown as an easy way to add emphasis, links, headings, etc. Markdown does not contain any keywords, as it is intended to be language-independent. However, Markdown syntax makes heavy use of square brackets [] and other characters that are difficult to type with an Ukrainian keyboard layout, e.g., the backtick `.

Check out commonmark, that is the Markdown standard supported by numerous converters including pandoc.

And if this is an exercise into that you can use a Markdown spec like CommonMark which is the spec Reddit and a variety of other sites use.