GitHub Flavored Markdown

After some time of pondering, I switched to GitHub-Flavoured Markdown (GFM)

Main thing that made me convert was that it's based on CommonMark, which claims to be one of the fastest Markdown renderers. And indeed, in my limited testing, a file which Markdown.pl took 0.1 second to process, both cmark and cmark-gfm processed in 0.002s - at least 50 times faster! Also it supports all fancy features that I desired:

• tables
• tasklists (like this one)
• strikethrough text
• footnotes¹

Also, there are some features that I actually don't care that much about, so won't even mention them :)

GitHub has a very wordy introduction into their version of Markdown, which also covers not only GFM, but also GitHub-specific features, like @mentions. Also they have more technically-worded spec, which is based on CommonMark's spec, thus being also very verbose. But at least they highlight GFM-specific features in a different color!

I only need to be careful when converting old posts into new format. For example, this markdown source:

    First line
    - second line
    third line

gets treated differently by Markdown.pl and CommonMark / GFM! Markdown.pl sees it all as a single paragraph, while others - as a line and a bullet list, i.e. like this source:

    First line

    * second line third line

That's because Markdown.pl requires an empty line before each list item.

Oh well.

But it means that I can't just replace call to Markdown.pl with a call to cmark-gfm! It should be configurable per-file. But actually it turned out to be pretty easy to achieve: Lazyblog already has templating which is configured with env variables, so it's trivial to add a new env variable (with default value of Markdown.pl), which can be overwritten by each file before it's processed by a markdown interpreter. Naturally, it also means that if a file sets this variable (called PROCESSOR) to value cat - then it's not processed, and thus can be written in plain HTML! Nice!

Relevant commit in git repo: 5bceaf.