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by chrismorgan 2121 days ago
These are the three most common cases that I find for needing raw HTML:

1. Adding classes to elements, for styling; admittedly this may be inapplicable to some visions of a document web, if you can’t write stylesheets.

2. Images. If you’re dealing with known images, you should always set the width and height attributes on the <img> tag, so that the page need not reflow as the image loads. Markdown’s image syntax (![description](src)) doesn’t cover that. (Perhaps an app could load the image and fill out the width and height as part of its Markdown-to-HTML conversion, but I haven’t encountered any that do this.)

3. Tables. CommonMark doesn’t include tables, and even dialects that do support tables are consistently insufficient so that I have to write HTML. For example: I often want the first column to be a heading; but I don’t think any Markdown table syntaxes allow you to get <th> instead of <td> for the first cell of each row.
1 comments
jabirali 2121 days ago
Fair enough :). For the record, Pandoc MarkDown supports all of these via its extended MarkDown syntax. For the first you can write [desc](src){.test} to get a class=test attribute on the link, for example. For the second, you can write ![desc](src){width=50%} to set the image size. For the last, tables do automatically get <th> on the first cell of each row when converted via Pandoc. This is however not standard MarkDown but Pandoc's extended version of MarkDown.
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