Hi Eric,
I'm not saying that you shouldn't put HTML in those fields, just mindful that they were not initially designed to take HTML, other than the most basic markup. Since newline characters in HTML are interpreted as whitespace and treated collectively as a single space, text is processed internally to replace newlines with <br>.
Perhaps the code that does this is not fully mature yet and needs to be more considerate of the surrounding content when doing this. either that or we introduce a <code> tag which wraps html to protect it from unnecessary post processing...
Will have a think about it...
John