HTML vs Markdown
| Property | HTML | Markdown |
|---|---|---|
| Full name | HyperText Markup Language | Markdown |
| File extensions | .html, .htm | .md, .markdown |
| Created by | Tim Berners-Lee at CERN; now maintained by WHATWG | John Gruber, with Aaron Swartz |
| Introduced | 1991 | 2004 |
| Compression | None: plain text with tags | None: plain text with light formatting marks (#, *, -) |
| Opens on | Every browser | GitHub, Notion, Obsidian, Reddit, Discord, any text editor and AI chat apps |
| Best for | Web pages | Notes, documentation, READMEs and text for AI models |
Why convert HTML to Markdown?
People convert HTML to Markdown to move content between systems: migrating a blog from WordPress to a static site generator, saving a help article into Obsidian or Notion, turning an HTML email into a README, or feeding a web page to an AI model without thousands of tokens of markup.
You can paste directly. When you copy part of a web page or a formatted document, the clipboard carries the HTML behind it, and the converter uses that rather than the plain text, so links, headings and lists survive. For a saved page, choose the .html file. With Main content only on, the converter looks for the page's main article and leaves out navigation, sidebars, cookie banners and footers.
Scripts, styles and tracking code are dropped. Images become [Image: alt text] markers when that option is on, which keeps the Markdown readable while showing where pictures were. For Word documents, see DOCX to Markdown.