You can store your content as a JSON object or as a good old HTML string. Both work fine. And of course, you can pass both formats to the editor to restore your content.
You can store your content as JSON and restore the content from HTML, or the other way around. I don’t know why you would do that, but tiptap wouldn’t care.
JSON is probably easier to loop through, for example to look for a mention and it’s more like what tiptap uses under the hood. Anyway, if you want to use JSON to store the content we provide a method to retrieve the content as JSON:
HTML can be easily rendered in other places, for example in emails and it’s wildly used, so it’s probably easier to switch the editor at some point. Anyway, every editor instance provides a method to get HTML from the current document:
You should really consider to work with HTML or JSON to store your content, they are perfectly fine for most use cases.
If you still think you need Markdown, [Nextcloud Text](https://github.com/nextcloud/text) uses tiptap to work with Markdown. Their code is open source, so maybe you can learn from them.