Markdown scoping with <section> and <div> blocks?

Question

I've noticed that block level things are not really markdown friendly. Imagine the following segment (Yes, I am intending to output for twitter bootstrap):

<section id="loremipsum">
    <div class="page-header">
    # Heading 1 #
    </div>

    Lorem ipsum, blah blah blah, yada yada yada.
</section>

The expected output should be:

<section id="loremipsum">
    <div class="page-header">
    <h1>Heading 1</h1>
    </div>
    <p>Lorem ipsum, blah blah blah, yada yada yada.</p>
</section>

Instead, the produced output is closer to:

<p><section id="loremipsum"></p>
<div class="page-header">
# Heading 1 #
</div>
<p>Lorem ipsum, blah blah blah, yada yada yada.</section></p>

There are two problems here:

1. As per suggested by Daring Fireball, Markdown should be smart enough to not put in un-wanted

   tags around block level elements such as section tag.

2. Heading 1 is not parsed as a heading, but instead left unparsed.

Both of these problems actually happens also in Dingus, the official parser, so I guess this is one of those "working as intended" kind of issue. That said, are there any markdown gurus out there that knows how to work around these problems?

Answer 1

A little late to the game, but an updated answer (as of summer 2015).

The question depends on which implementation you use, but a good reference on markdown is CommonMark. According to the HTML-blocks specification you can get the wanted result with this markdown:

<section id="loremipsum">
  <div class="page-header">

  # Heading 1 #

  </div>

  Lorem ipsum, blah blah blah, yada yada yada.

</section>

Note the empty lines, which are end conditions for HTML-blocks. Also note:

The block begins with a line that meets a start condition (after up to three spaces optional indentation).

Meaning one should be careful with indenting the start of HTML-blocks.

markdown-it implements commonmark 100% in js, perl-commonmark gives you bindings to CommonMark C library, and I guess you will find implementations of CommonMark in most programming languages.