Markdown isn't rendering the <sup> tag correctly

Question

Recently I made an edit to this question in Literature SE. The added part is a link inside a tag:

<sup>
The mot was made by mathematician Poincaré in his essay [The future of mathematics](https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Poincare_Future/): "Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things."  
Follow up: [Is poetry the art of giving different names to the same thing?](https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5220/1015)</sup> 

This is how it renders:

This is fine in another post, say this question:

I'm not sure if this the result of switching to CommonMark or not.

Answer 1

We do not allow the rendering of Markdown within block-level HTML, only inline. Once you start using HTML, all of your formatting within it has to continue using HTML too. You'll have to convert the Markdown for the link to an HTML link manually in order for it to render.

However, that interpretation is pretty basic in the system... In your example, you have a new line after the <sup> which makes it get interpreted as a block-level element instead of the inline element it should be. Removing the new line fixes the issue for your case.

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^{The mot was made by mathematician Poincaré in his essay The future of mathematics: "Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things."
Follow up: Is poetry the art of giving different names to the same thing?}