The proper solution would be to devise a custom markup element, such as for example: `|> pull right content |> and <|  pull left content <| and the collapsing of sequential line breaks is already present in the markdown parser, it need only add the <br /> token.

Needing to use the html entity &lt; to cause < - it seems to me there should be an escape character in the language same as is used in regex and commandline parsers. Nobody uses backslashes for anything, except Micro$oft, and if you use it as escape, just \\ and note, I had to type 3 backslashes to get 1, so there is already a tokenising identifier for that.

If the quality of code in steemd's username sanitiser is any indication, the whole parser is gonna be a study in overly complex, insanely kludgy code, that resembles how I would have written it when I was 9 years old on my TRS-80 CoCo in MS Basic.