While Markdown is a powerful markup language that allows editing and formatting in plain text format that can then be parsed and rendered as HTML. It has a declarative syntax that is both powerful and easy to learn for technical and non-technical folks.

CommonMark is a rationalized version of Markdown syntax with a spec whose goal is to remove the ambiguities and inconsistency surrounding the original Markdown specification. It offers a standardized specification that defines the common syntax of the language along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification.

Brief history on 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.

Who have adopt CommonMark ?

  • Discourse
  • GitHub
  • GitLab
  • Reddit
  • Qt
  • Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange
  • Swift
    See the full list here

Well, its already sometimes (in years) my journey on programming field. Somehow the moment that reaccuring on my mind is, when still on highschool i am editing a post on kaskus. Driven by the desire so my post is appear nicely like any school text book.

Lovely, our international QA site remind me of markdown, short summary of markdown already written by John Gruber. An opensource should be familiar using markdown. I like to say that CommonMark is enhanced version of markdown and you can take alook the spec.