it is not mine to improve the shortcode handling in WordPress. It is in the hands of the WordPress team.

One thing that I’ve discovered since is that it is probably not the API, or not the API alone. Much of it is “courtesy” of WP’s TinyMCE integration.

I know there are content creators who use the Visual Editor to input their content and shortcodes.

When they do this, paragraph tags wrap around the shortcode and gets rendered when they publish their article.

This, of course, does not validate the HTML!

This is something Wordpress has to address!

The “paragraph wrapping” thing (and other ) occurs even in the HTML editor – AFAICT it is due to built-in WordPress filters that are triggered before editor content is saved to the database, and after it is read from the database. I’m experimenting with another (not yet published) shortcode right now, and it blows my mind that when the shortcode returns something wrapped in a block element (like a div), WordPress prepends a <p> tag without closing it, which my browser interprets as a <p></p> (but other browsers have other interpretations).

I sure hope WP improves on this dramatically.