Create md files for site from html: Why does it convert <br/> to \?

Question

I use pandoc to convert old html files to md, which I subsequently use in a Maven site, where they are compiled to html.

The tags <br/> in the old html file are converted to \ in markdown, which becomes \ in the html file.

Is there any meaning for having separate lines with backslashes in markdown? Does the maven-site-plugin not understand them? Are they some kind of markdown dialect?

Answer 1

The br are converted to an escaped newline, i.e. a backslash followed by a newline. You can tell pandoc to not do that, i.e. disable that extension:

$ pandoc -f html -t markdown-escaped_line_breaks input.html