It turns out that all you have to do is go to ecto preferences / editing and change the default editing mode to html, and then ecto will refrain from trying to understand your markup. Of course this means giving up wysiwyg by default, but that is fine by me - and it is easy to switch modes.

This isa constant problem for WYSIWYG editing: doing visual editing of content that has been marked up 'properly' to begin with, using for example nice semantic markup with definition lists, acronyms etc etc. We had a big problem with kupu and the NGRF site content development; we had yound Mathew slaving away bulk converting MSWord content into clean, semanticall marked-up web documents, then an editor would fix something in kupu and destroy a lot of markup. We had to fiddle with kupu to try to get it to understand the markup, but this is made hard because of the way the native browser contetEditable works :O(

anyway... below is an example of using markup ecto does not know how to edit, and editing the post aftwerwards without problem...

testing a definition list, and edited

this

def of this

that

def of that