Or again...

Sat May 1 12:52:15 EDT 2004

Given that the Markdown specification states...

  For any markup that is not covered by Markdown's syntax, you simply
  use HTML itself. There's no need to preface it or delimit it to
  indicate that you're switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use
  the tags.

  The only restrictions are that block-level HTML elements --
  e.g. <div>, <table>, <pre>, <p>, etc. -- must be separated from
  surrounding content by blank lines, and the start and end tags of
  the block should not be indented with tabs or spaces. Markdown is
  smart enough not to add extra (unwanted) <p> tags around HTML
  block-level tags.

...why does this:

===============================================================

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>FOO</title>
</HEAD>

<body>

  etc...

===============================================================

...turn into this?

===============================================================

<p><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"></p>

<p><HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>FOO</title>
</HEAD></p>

<p><body></p>

  etc...

==============================================================

I thought Markdown was smart enough not to enclose block-level HTML
elements in paragraph tags.

Is Markdown only intended for blogging, in which postprocessing is
done by the blog software and all the foofarra of standalone HTML
documents is not needed?  If so, then the documentation should say
that Markdown is not intended for standalone HTML documents.
Otherwise, I suggest that this is a bug and should be fixed, or that
Markdown markup for HTML title tags and so on be added to the spec.

Ron H-E

-- 
    Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe at ludism.org ... http://ron.ludism.org/
	 Center for Ludic Synergy, Seattle Cosmic Game Night,
Kennexions Glass Bead Game & Positive Revolution FAQ: http://www.ludism.org/
	     My brains are pink -- you can see 'em work!