Local-first and privacy-focused web utilities are having a massive comeback. With browser engines becoming faster and WebAssembly/Web Workers maturing, there is rarely a reason to push sensitive user documents to an external backend for simple conversions.
While building MD-Convert (a zero-upload document to Markdown converter), I explored how to parse real-world documents into clean Markdown entirely on the client side.
Here is a breakdown of the core architecture and libraries that make purely in-browser document processing possible.
1. Converting Web Articles with Readability + Turndown
Converting messy web markup into clean Markdown involves two distinct steps:
