Let’s say I create the following entry in Movable Type 3.2. Five paragraphs with the middle three enclosed in a blockquote. Fairly standard blog post skeleton.

paragraph 1

<blockquote>
paragraph 2

paragraph 3

paragraph 4
</blockquote>

paragraph 5

What HTML do I want MT to produce as a result?

<p>paragraph 1</p>

<blockquote>
<p>paragraph 2</p>

<p>paragraph 3</p>

<p>paragraph 4</p>
</blockquote>

<p>paragraph 5</p>

What HTML does MT actually produce? Invalidly nested HTML. Fun.

<p>paragraph 1</p>

<blockquote>
paragraph 2

<p>paragraph 3</p>

<p>paragraph 4<br />
</blockquote></p>

<p>paragraph 5</p>

What a bummer. I would consider this a fairly critical bug. Oh, and WordPress gets this right. Workaround: manually mark up the paragraphs inside the blockquote. One more thing I wish I didn’t have to remember.

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.