@capbri @hrbrmstr Like, if you just included regular HTML like this in a Markdown file:
<div>
<p>blah</p>
</div>
when pandoc renders it, it would see the four spaces in front of <p> and treat that line as code and render it as <pre><code><p>blah</p></code></pre>
If you wrap it in a raw block, pandoc won't parse it as markdown and it'll go straight into the HTML document as is
```{=html}
<div>
<p>blah</p>
</div>
```
@capbri @hrbrmstr That creates a pandoc RawBlock, which prevents the contents from getting parsed as Markdown (see https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/tables.html#html-tables for an example)