TanStack Markdown

TanStack Markdown is a small, synchronous Markdown parser and renderer built for technical blogs and documentation.

It provides three independently importable paths:

A parser that produces a deterministic, serializable AST
An HTML renderer with safe defaults
A React renderer with the same core output semantics

The package has no runtime dependencies. React is a peer dependency used only by @tanstack/markdown/react, and syntax highlighting stays outside the Markdown bundle.

Why another Markdown library?

General Markdown processors optimize for broad conformance, plugin ecosystems, or content transformation pipelines. Those are valid goals, but a controlled docs site often needs much less:

familiar prose, links, images, tables, lists, footnotes, and code fences
deterministic server and client rendering
explicit handling of raw HTML and executable URLs
code metadata for documentation UI
a small browser bundle

TanStack Markdown spends its complexity budget on that path. It deliberately does not implement every CommonMark edge case, MDX evaluation, automatic linkification, or a general asynchronous processing ecosystem.

Core properties

Small entry points

Current minified browser bundles are 4.6 KB gzip for the parser, 6.4 KB for HTML rendering, and 6.3 KB for the React adapter with React externalized. The generated bundle report is the source of truth.

Parse once, render many

parseMarkdown returns plain objects and arrays. The result can be serialized, cached, inspected, transformed, and passed to either renderer.

Safe defaults

Raw HTML is escaped unless allowHtml is enabled. Executable URL protocols such as javascript: are removed from links and images.

Focused compatibility

The supported contract is the TanStack docs syntax profile, not full CommonMark or GFM. Compatibility is continuously measured so established behavior cannot regress silently.