Okay I can recreate some strange behaviour:
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops">
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<p>*</p>
<p> This text precedes <dl> this text comes after </p>
</body>
</html>
Then in PageEdit if I select the text "<dl>" and use the Chain Link Icon and type in as the target any external url, I end up with it split out and somehow an actual dl tag is included by the editor which hides the link text and splits the preceding paragraph.
See the image below for how things look in PageEdit's Inspector after inserting the link.
So no text is lost in this case.
Inserting a single space around the dl makes everything work:
ie.
Code:
<p> This text precedes < dl > this text comes after </p>
It acts even worse when a non-existing tag name is used between the < and >.
For example: this leads to lost code:
Code:
<p> This text precedes <nhjdl> this text comes after </p>