No Markdown in <div>s or <table>s ?

[Sherwood Botsford]

Here's an example of why I set the flag off

For my blog



### 5 April
## Greenhouse hot

Last night I plugged in the electric heater for the greenhouse, and
started doing the cleanup.  Today everything that has true leaves on it moves
out of the dining room and into the green house.  I've got 6 weeks to
get these plants ready for the first farmer's market.  Not sure if
I'm going to make it.

<div class=pic>

![My front yard -- Pines in
winter](/Images/whatsnew-2009/Pines-in-winter-2009-04-05_13-56-13.jpeg)

Maybe I'm jumping the gun just a bit. This part of the yard doesn't look
much like spring.

***

</div>

So in general I have

Main flow of text

<div clase=foo>

Picture reference

Caption text

ruler line

</div>

more main flow

<div...>

class=pic floats left, and is 40% of the width of the parent.
class=picr floats right, and is 40% of the width of the parent.

This gives me a layout that works on pretty much everything from an
iPhone to a 21" display.

Now, postulate that I wanted to completely divorce the layout from the
content:  How would I do it?


Blog day:

include start_page.
include main_flow_1
<div class = pic>
include pic1
</div>
include main_flow_2
<div class = picr>
include pic2
</div>
include main_flow_3
include end_page

Yikes.  Every photo I want to include will usually require an
additional two files.

Markdown was intended to reduce the amount of time we spent chasing
tags, and to be easy to write, edit and read in plain form as well as
published form. But layout is messier than email, and as soon as you
get to *anything* that you don't want to run in a fixed width column,
it starts getting creaky.

I'm sure there are situations where you DONT want markdown to process
what is inside block tags -- mostly stuff talking about markdown, near
as I can figure, but I bet the number of people who actually need
"ignore contents of block tags" are a small minority.

Now if I could just figure out how to keep markdown from wrapping
block tags in <p>'s