Investigate a possibility to generate markdown preview on FE instead of BE

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At the moment, markdown preview is generated on the server that means live-preview should constantly send requests to the BE to get the updated preview. This might unnecessarily load our infrastructure. This issue suggests moving that computation to FE instead.

Technical ground

There are several JS libraries doing markdown to HTML conversion. Some options:

• markdown-it
• remarkable
• etc.

Computations should be properly debounced. Maybe we should explore the WebWorker path for this purpose to unload the main thread.

UPDATE 04 Feb, 2022:

After looking into the Unist ecosystem, I would suggest the following plan for this issue:

• Use Remark for parsing markdown content and convert it into AST (mdast)
• Pass on mdast to Rehype. This will convert the tree to hast
• Get HTML string out of hast

To account for gitlab flavored markup, we should either

• Review functionality of remark-gfm, or
• Write our own plugin based on remark-gfm and supporting all the functionality gitlab flavored markup provides