HTML to Markdown

How to use HTML to Markdown

1. Paste your HTML.
2. The Markdown appears alongside it.
3. Check tables, nested lists and anything unusual before using the result.
4. Classes, ids, styles and layout elements are dropped — Markdown cannot express them.
5. Complex tables may come through as raw HTML, which is valid Markdown and usually the right answer.
6. Conversion runs in your browser, so unpublished content is not transmitted.

What survives and what does not

Markdown expresses a small, deliberate subset of HTML: headings, paragraphs, emphasis, lists, links, images, blockquotes, code and — by extension — tables. Anything outside that has nowhere to go. Classes, ids, inline styles, data attributes, divs and spans, iframes, form elements and most of the structure of a modern web page simply vanish, because Markdown has no way to say them. That is the point of the conversion rather than a failure of it, but it means converting a full page gives you the article and none of the furniture.

Nested and complex structures are where it gets ugly

Markdown handles a nested list well and a table containing a list badly, because Markdown tables cannot contain block elements at all. A table with paragraphs in its cells has to stay as HTML — which is legal in Markdown, and is what a good converter falls back to. Deeply nested blockquotes, definition lists and figures with captions all come through approximately at best. Check anything structurally unusual by eye.

Round-tripping is lossy in one direction

Markdown to HTML and back is roughly stable. HTML to Markdown and back is not: the second HTML will be simpler than the first, having lost every attribute and wrapper. So converting a page to Markdown to edit it and then publishing the re-rendered HTML will quietly strip your styling hooks. Convert when you are moving to a Markdown-native system for good, not as a temporary editing step.