> where in the HTML spec does it say that the interior of pre is parsed differently?

I was wrong about that. I had a vague memory of putting HTML inside a PRE tag once and having it come out as if it were escaped, but apparently I hallucinated that.

> A major example is that the Vim editor uses pre for formatting syntax colored code to HTML (when you do that with :TOhtml).

OK, I stand corrected on that too.

> If we are parsing HTML (to Lisp objects or whatever), we should preserve the exact whitespace. The reverse generation should regurgitate the original whitespace. > If we take the license to eliminate newlines, then we ruin pre. The fix is simply not to do that.

Right.

Actually, I just realized that I mis-read the example. I saw <br /> and thought it was </br>. (Maybe the OP edited it?) In any case, the example now reads:

    <pre>
      <span>one
      </span>
      <br>
      <span>two</span>
      <br />
    </pre>

And you can render that in sexpr syntax as:

    (:pre "
      " (:span "one
      ") "
      " (:br) "
      " (:span "two") "
      " (:br) "
    ")

This is a particularly bad example to demonstrate here because the whitespace in the code plays badly with the whitespace in the HN markup. But I tried running this code and it does work. Here is the output copied-and-pasted verbatim from my listener:

    <pre>
      <span>one
      </span>
      <br />
      <span>two</span>
      <br />
    </pre>

Note that both BR tags are rendered as <br />.