It seems SF's flavor of markdown doesn't support definition lists. I assumed I would get around this by using the HTML dl tag, but it turns out that SF markdown also doesn't handle the dl tag too well. As you can see in the example below, not only is there no indentation but the entire block is reverse-indented. I know definition lists weren't in the original Markdown, but some dialects have adopted the syntax PHP markdown extra syntax, shown here: http://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/extra/
Definition lists don't get much love, but they are part of the HTML spec and some people are very attached to them (myself included!)
example HTML definition list: