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Published on 16 Sep 2026. Tagged with meta, micro.

This site is now finally able to define and render content in CommonMark. Until today, for historical reasons[1], all Markdown was interpreted and rendered using kramdown. I added a CommonMark→HTML renderer today because I more and more started to use small Markdown snippets here and there with simple formatting needs. My existing kramdown rendering stack calls the kramdown executable in an external process. That’s fine for larger tasks such as rendering longer articles which might use more involved formatting features, but it got annoyingly slow for more basic tasks. CommonMark is a much simpler standard with implementations in different programming languages, so I can render everything in memory without the indirection and overhead of external calls. The site is generated statically, so all of this happens under the hood. But it makes the whole build process so much simpler when rendering most of the Markdown is basically free of cost. You don’t need to worry too much about caching, you can just re-render.

[1] The initial infrastructure of this site predates CommonMark by quite a bit.