The inline directive applies a template to each page-to-be-inlined, but the loop over the pages is in the Perl, not the template itself. This means if I want to wrap a container <div> or a <table> or whatever around the entire set of inlined pages, I can't do it by just editing the template. In fact, I think the only way to do it without hacking any Perl is with a wrapper template directive, e.g.
[[!template id="wrapinline" pages="..."]]
with a template definition like
<div id="foo">[[!inline ... pages="<TMPL_VAR raw_pages>"]]</div>
It would be much more convenient if the loop over pages happened in the template, allowing me to just stick whatever markup I want around the loop.
Unfortunatly, I don't think this can be changed at this point, it would probably break a lot of stuff that relies on the current template arrangement, both in ikiwiki's internals and in people's own, customised inline templates. (Also, I have some plans to allow a single inline to use different templates for different sorts of pages, which would rely on the current one template per page approach to work.)
But there is a simple workaround.. the first template in an inline has FIRST set, and the last one has LAST set. So you can use that to emit your div or table top and bottom.