Lately I’ve been working on a few sites to enable people to create content for their sites easily using markdown. Editing html is a pain, and it is easier to write in a textfield or texteditor for most people than some kind of wysiwyg html editor. Plus there are preview components in javascript which make creating a CMS really easy for these things.

What about when you want to use plain old html?

Because the markdown syntax is simplified, every once in a while you want to jazz up your page with something a little more complicated. Just drop in the html - but remember a few rules about html in markdown http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

• block level elements div, table, pre, p, etc must be separated by a blank line
• markdown will not be evaluated inside these block level elements
• markdown will be evaluated inside span level or non-block elements like span, cite, or del