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Markdown Rendering Behavior

2 posts · Feb 2014 – Sep 2021

What this trail covers

GitLab has evolved its Markdown rendering to align with the CommonMark specification, ensuring consistent rendering across the platform. This involved a phased migration from RedCarpet to CommonMark, first for new content and then for repository and wiki files. The process included driving upstream changes to libraries like cmark-gfm and commonmarker to address specific rendering behaviors and bugs. The goal is to provide a more predictable and reliable user experience for all Markdown content. This post details the change to require two spaces at the end of a line for a newline, aligning with the Markdown specification and applying this behavior to descriptions and comments in issues and merge requests.

All GitLab trails
  1. GitLab's realtime Preview Markdown is an editor for everyoneIntroduced a real-time, side-by-side Markdown preview feature in the Web IDE and Web Editor. This feature allows users to toggle a split-screen live preview of their Markdown content, rendering changes as they are made. The functionality can be accessed by right-clicking the editor and selecting 'Preview Markdown' or by using the `Command/Control + Shift + P` shortcut.
  2. How we migrated to CommonMarkThis post details the phased migration of GitLab's Markdown rendering from RedCarpet to CommonMark. It outlines the technical decisions, including the use of a `cached_markdown_version` for managing the transition, and the development of a tool using Pandoc to convert existing content. It also highlights contributions made upstream to cmark-gfm and commonmarker to support specific rendering behaviors like double-tilde strikethrough and fix a `<tbody>` rendering bug.
  3. Markdown newline behaviourThis post details the proposed change to Markdown rendering behavior in GitLab, specifically requiring two spaces at the end of a line for a newline to conform to the Markdown specification. This change will be applied consistently across markdown files, issue descriptions, and merge request comments.