> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
Using some semantic HTML as an occasional escape hatch is perfectly in line with this overall goal.
That, and in-line HTML. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html:
“For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags.
The only restrictions are that block-level HTML elements — e.g. <div>, <table>, <pre>, <p>, etc. — must be separated from surrounding content by blank lines, and the start and end tags of the block should not be indented with tabs or spaces. Markdown is smart enough not to add extra (unwanted) <p> tags around HTML block-level tags.”
Because of that, I think I would use a html renderer to render markdown. Because people allowing arbitrary HTML opens a huge can of worms I might also whitelist a restricted set of HTML.
The key point here is to use the WebView only for the text view. Where it goes wrong is when people start writing entire interactive UIs in the WebView.
The other option would be PDFKit, but most people aren't nearly as comfortable programming with PDF as they are with HTML.
> Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.
HTML embedding was also integral to it: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html
> Markdown’s syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web. […] For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself.
