michelfortin

Ok so you’re telling me my plugin could be the cause. Without more specific information it’ll be difficult to find the culprit however.

What would be useful is the server log which may contain the errors that caused this. Other helpful data would be the actual HTML page given by WordPress when the problem arise, a list of the active WordPress plugins you have, and the PHP version on your server.

Get the latest version of PHP Markdown, this has been taken care of.

This is a well known difficulty in web design. Browsers will do word wrap but won’t break a word when it is too long. IE expands the box (which in your case push the sidebar below) while Firefox and other browsers following web standards will simply let the text overflow without changing the layout.

The best answer I can give you is that that you should break your “binary text” with spaces.

Read this if you’re interested in the technical details.

I’ve checked this on the PHP Markdown Dingus:

<script><[CDATA[ test() // ]]></script>

And Markdown doesn’t change anything. Are you sure Markdown is the problem? Are you using the latest version (1.0.1b)? It could also be another WordPress filter down in the chain in which case the problem would still be visible when deactivating Markdown.

I see what it is now. It’s a bug that slipped in version 1.0.1a, because of my lack of testing I guess.

What happens is that WordPress 1.5 now enforce a list of tags that can be inserted by the user in comments and strip those not in this list. This caused problems to Markdown because the automatic link syntax looks like a tag and was stripped prior Markdown filtering. To work around that in 1.0.1a, I’ve postponed the tag filter until after Markdown has done it’s work. But now since <p> is not an allowed tag for user input, it strips it, along <blockquote> and some other.

I’m not sure what to do exactly yet. I guess I could completely disable the tag filter. If you want to do that now, you can remove or comment line 56 in markdown.php:

add_filter('comment_text', 'wp_filter_kses', 45);

Yes, PHP Markdown 1.0.1a is the latest version.

The Markdown syntax on paragraphs and line breaks says:

When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.

Because of this, Markdown works well with “hard-wrapped” text paragraphs.

You may also try my own PHP port of SmartyPants. It already works as a WordPress plugin, just like PHP Markdown.

http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-smartypants/

Nice workaround. Markdown formatting inside div and other block-level tags is planned for a future version (probably 1.1). Until then, this is a nice trick indeed.