div & span support

[A. Pagaltzis]

* John Fraser <showdown at attacklab.net> [2007-03-05 03:30]:

> I think the distinction between span-level elements and

> block-level elements is artificial; why should Markdown work in

> one and not the other?


I’ve come to appreciate the fact that it means you can pump the
output of Markdown back through Markdown without it getting
reprocessed, which happens because Markdown wraps everything in
`<p>` that isn’t already wrapped. It makes it easy to assemble
things piecemeal where that’s useful, including pasting a chunk
of HTML from someone else’s content. (I often _View Selection
Source_ to copy from the source when I want to quote a page,
f.ex.)

If there was some form of `<verbatim>` tag, these properties
could be preserved without the block element rule, though. People
who want to output strictly valid HTML would then have to
post-process the output, but it’s much simpler to make sure you
post-process just once than it is to make sure you’ll only ever
process any specific part of the document just once, and it only
takes one `s!</?verbatim>!!g` to do it.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>