Here are three use-cases:

1. You are editing documents locally on your computer. This lets you double-click to view nice markdown in a web browser with a `file://` url.

2. You are editing a website, but don't have control over the server-side code.

3. You don't want to install a markdown rendering library on the server.

> You are editing a website, but don't have control over the server-side code.

You don't have control over the server-side code, but it will let you inject <script> tags into the content? That seems a bit weird.

GitHub pages is literally like this, no?

You're right, though GHP is a bad example since it includes a Markdown renderer.

Back in 2013 I did a similar thing for a client with a popular code library.

Their documentation was written in markdown and the site was hosted on static hosting, so no server-side conversion.

Although the web page chrome (navigation, etc) was in HTML, they wanted the documentation to be in markdown under the hood after upload. They didn’t want to use any kind of conversion prior to uploading because they needed to make on-the-fly changes to the documentation after upload without writing in HTML.

So we opted to go with client-side markdown to html conversion on pageload. complete with a clickable legend and tabs to switch between language implementations for code examples.

Putting the markdown inside regular page formatting tags wasn’t reliable, as different browsers did different things to the content (for example some browsers converted “&” to “&amp;” and the indentations for code was not respected). So we had to store the markdown in some sort of preformatted tag block.

However <pre> required special escaping of code characters ( <, >, &, etc).

So we opted to go with using a little-known <xmp> tag to store the markdown as search-engine indexable code. Since content inside <xmp> will be read as plaintext instead of being formatted by the browser, it was also great for being the input of a client-side markdown-to-html converter.

It worked quite well. If you want to see it in action it’s at https://www.genivia.com/dev.html

Sometimes I just want to get some information out there on the internet, and rather than sharing a Evernote page or having to create a webpage I can just write markdown.

Main use-case is when I want to share a markdown doc in a private GitHub repo, with a public url e.g http://oscarmorrison.com/md-page/oimasdoijasdmadeupurl-01231...

Very cool. Thanks for sharing. Btw, I got an SSL certificate error when I went to check out your site. I know there's a few different ways to account for this when serving up a website from github, but I'd welcome guidance on what the best practice is for fixing this.

Hey @jonnydubowsky thanks for catching that. Just fixed it all up now, so should be good. This is what I did to fix https://gist.github.com/cvan/8630f847f579f90e0c014dc5199c337...