Sometimes you need to mark up what Markdown doesn’t. It’s tempting to pick up a heavyweight Markdown variant, such as MDX, or to build your own just-this-once extension. But extensions to Markdown are often eye-wateringly ugly, fragile, and prone to lock-in. What’s to be done, switch formats? No, you’re too busy for that.

In this talk, I’ll teach you about the little-used extension points that already exist in mainstream Markdown flavors, such as CommonMark, and how to take advantage of them before going off the beaten path. In this talk, you’ll learn about:

• The risks of inventing or adopting yet another Markdown variant
• Three extension points that you can start using today with your existing tools
• When deviating from Markdown can truly help

Daniel D. Beck is a documentation consultant who helps software engineering teams make tools, processes, and content that reach developer audiences. His talk draws from experience as a longtime contributor and maintainer of open source software and documentation, including as a current maintainer of Baseline, a browser compatibility tool, and a past role as technical content lead for MDN Web Docs.