The same knowledge,
for humans and AI alike.
Mindmap Markdown is a round-trip-stable Markdown profile for human–AI knowledge exchange.
A format that serves people and machines needs four properties
Markdown delivers three of them outright. The fourth holds only while the document stays shallow.
Drawing the tree is easy.
Getting back without losing anything is not.
Once a document has real hierarchical depth, a human can no longer see its shape in plain text, while the same structure is trivially legible when drawn as a tree. When an LLM rewrites a document, these are silently destroyed, and no standard yet treats this as a problem.
One self-contained HTML file. Two views.
A Mindmap Markdown document renders to a single self-contained HTML file: no server, no runtime, no installation. The viewer carries two views of the same document, because no single view survives every scale.
Mindmap
shape, at a glanceholds up when depth is highOutline
sequence, navigableholds up when node count is highConformance levels
Levels are cumulative. An implementation states the highest level it claims.
A conforming document is ordinary Markdown. Its hierarchy survives in every existing Markdown tool.
Lift and canonical projection: a document determines one tree, a tree determines one document, and the two are mutually inverse.
Structural diff and merge between trees, and working on a subtree without the rest of the document.
Design constraints
It is still Markdown
A Mindmap Markdown file opens and renders in GitHub, Obsidian, or any editor you already use. Adoption cost starts at zero.
Semantics in, presentation beside
Layout and styling live in a sidecar, never in the text sent to a model.
Conformance is testable
A specification that cannot be checked is a suggestion. The spec and its test suite come from the same source.
Interoperate, not compete
Adapters for existing formats such as OPML, JSON Canvas, and markmap come first.
Repositories
specpublic
The specification and its normative examples
mindmapmdL1
Reference implementation: lift and canonical projection
conformanceplanned
Test suite, runner, and implementation registry
adaptersplanned
Interoperability with OPML, JSON Canvas, and markmap
The most useful moment to disagree is now
The specification is at its earliest and most changeable stage.