I would like to define two templates, one being a "start" template which contains <div style="bunch of stuff">
and the other containing just </div>
However, the "</div>" is being escaped by the MW engine, so appears verbatim in the page, rather than functioning as an HTML end tag.
Is there a way around this? I'm guessing the problem is that the MW engine doesn't see matching start and end divs when it parses the markup, and so decides that </div> should be interpreted literally rather than as HTML.
Defining just a single template that wraps the tags around the content is not an option; the stuff within the tags can be quite complex, and our experience is that the standard markup is just too fragile to be able to do that sort of thing.
We could of course just put literal divs into the pages, but that gets messy, and also means we can't change the style in the future.
Many thanks for your suggestions, Ken