Question 1

Which Markdown flavour does this follow?

Accepted Answer

CommonMark, with the GitHub Flavored Markdown extensions enabled: tables, task lists, strikethrough and automatic linking of bare URLs. That combination is what GitHub, GitLab, Reddit and most static site generators use, so output here matches what you see in a README. Extensions outside GFM, such as footnotes, definition lists or MathJax blocks, are not part of the spec and are left as plain text.

Question 2

Why is my HTML showing up as visible text?

Accepted Answer

Because raw HTML is escaped by default: a

in your source is written out as the characters that make up the tag, so it renders as text rather than as markup. That is the safe default for content you did not write yourself. Tick "Keep raw HTML instead of escaping it" and your tags pass through untouched, which is what CommonMark itself specifies.

Question 3

Why did my single line breaks disappear?

Accepted Answer

In standard Markdown a single newline is just a space: only a blank line starts a new paragraph, and only two trailing spaces or a backslash force a
. GitHub comments and issues break that rule and turn every newline into a line break, which is why text pasted from an issue looks wrong elsewhere. The "single line breaks become
" option switches between the two behaviours.

Question 4

What do the heading anchors do?

Accepted Answer

They add an id to every heading, derived from its text, so "Getting Started" becomes id="getting-started" and you can link to #getting-started from anywhere on the page. The rule matches GitHub's: lowercase, punctuation removed, spaces to hyphens, and repeated headings numbered -1, -2. Note that this differs from a URL slug, which would also transliterate accented letters.

Question 5

Is the preview exactly what I will get?

Accepted Answer

The structure is, the styling is not. The preview borrows this page's fonts and colours, while your HTML arrives unstyled and inherits whatever CSS the destination has. One deliberate difference: scripts, styles and event handlers are stripped from the preview so a pasted document cannot run code here. The HTML you copy is your document as written.

Question 6

Can I convert a whole README file?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Drop a .md file onto the input, or use the Upload button, and it loads in full. Turn on the full document wrapper if you want a standalone .html file: it adds the doctype, the charset and viewport meta tags, and a title taken from the first heading in the document.

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