Markdown to HTML

Markdown to HTML — How Markdown Became the Web Writing Standard

Markdown was created by John Gruber in 2004 with one goal: make writing for the web as easy as writing a plain text email. The core idea was that Markdown syntax should be readable even without being rendered — a **bold word** looks bold even as raw text. Today, Markdown is the standard for README files, documentation, blog posts, and comments on GitHub, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Notion.

Markdown to HTML conversion

Every Markdown element maps to an HTML element. # Heading becomes <h1>. **bold** becomes <strong>. [text](url) becomes <a href="url">. A blank line between paragraphs creates <p> tags. Fenced code blocks with triple backticks become <pre><code> elements, optionally with a language class for syntax highlighting.

GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)

GitHub extended standard Markdown with practical additions: tables with pipe syntax (| Col1 | Col2 |), task lists with checkboxes (- [ ] item), strikethrough with double tildes (~~text~~), and auto-linking of URLs. This converter supports GFM including tables and task lists, making it suitable for converting GitHub README files.

Using the HTML output

The HTML output from this converter is unstyled — it contains semantic HTML tags but no CSS classes. To make it look good, apply a stylesheet. If you're using it in a web application, sanitize the HTML through a library like DOMPurify before inserting into the DOM to prevent XSS attacks from user-generated Markdown.