Conventions and flavors

June 3, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Markdown is not one language. GitHub renders things plain CommonMark does not, and a portable doc must avoid both. mdsmith makes the target explicit.

A convention is one config switch. It applies a curated preset of style rules plus a renderer flavor. MDS034 then flags any syntax the flavor will not render. A portable doc cannot smuggle in GitHub-only constructs.

Template files stay exempt. An opt-in placeholder vocabulary marks tokens like {name} as opaque. A scaffold file is not flagged as broken prose.

See the conventions reference and the flavor concept for the preset bundles and how layering works.