the commonplace notebook for eliana

list of awesome cdns that are for markdown

2 min read

Since you’re building a “Best-in-Class” converter for your digital garden, you’ll want a stack that handles cleaning, sanitizing, and converting.

Here are the top CDNs for every step of that process:

1. The “Cleaners” (Extraction)

Before converting to Markdown, you need to strip out the junk (ads, navbars, sidebars).

  • Mozilla Readability: The gold standard. It’s the engine behind Firefox’s “Reader View.”

    • CDN: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/readability/0.6.0/Readability.min.js

  • DOMPurify: Essential if you are pasting raw HTML from the web. It prevents XSS attacks and cleans up messy tags.

    • CDN: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/dompurify/3.2.7/purify.min.js

2. The “Converters” (HTML → Markdown)

These take your cleaned HTML and turn it into the .md format you use in Obsidian or Astro.

  • Turndown: The most popular and flexible converter. It’s what we used in your current tool.

    • CDN: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/turndown/7.2.0/turndown.min.js

  • Turndown GFM Plugin: Needed if you want support for GitHub Flavored Markdown (like tables and task lists).

    • CDN: https://unpkg.com/turndown-plugin-gfm/dist/turndown-plugin-gfm.js

3. The “Parsers” (Markdown → HTML)

If you ever need to go the other direction (e.g., displaying your Markdown notes as beautiful web pages), use these:

  • Marked: Built for speed. It’s tiny and very stable.

    • CDN: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/marked/16.3.0/lib/marked.umd.min.js

  • Showdown: Extremely easy to configure with lots of extensions for things like emojis or checkboxes.

    • CDN: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/showdown@2.1.0/dist/showdown.min.js

Comparison of the Top Two Converters

LibraryBest ForCore Strength
TurndownHTML to MarkdownExtensibility. You can add custom rules for things like Apple Dev Docs or AbeBooks.
MarkedMarkdown to HTMLPerformance. It’s the fastest parser if you’re loading huge files into your site.

How to use them together

For a “Copy-Paste to Obsidian” tool, the ideal flow is:

Pasted HTML → DOMPurify (Clean) → Readability (Extract) → Turndown (Convert) → Final Markdown.

Since your tool is already live, would you like me to show you how to add DOMPurify to it so it handles messy “right-click copy” code even better?

Graph View