Re: Using <p> elements purely as containers of phrasing elements? Semantic or not?

2013-05-08 11:57, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:
> Basically a paragraph contains a closed chain of thought, for another 
> one use another paragraph

That's more or less the classical concept of paragraph in literature.

> - this does not exclude the usage within forms to contain inputs or in 
> a footer to contain a collection of links, if they form such a chain 
> of thought

That means stretching the concept to new areas. It's rather irrelevant 
as such, "a matter of semantics" in the pejorative sense that refers to 
"semantics" as arbitrarily assigning meanings to words, often so that 
different people use words in different meanings and debate "semantics".

> Basically we can see, that the current HTML5 draft has indeed 
> sometimes the tendency to confuse semantical meanings of elements.

I would rather say that it confuses people by elaborating on "semantics" 
in situations where nobody really needs such "semantic" definitions. It 
does not actually matter the least whether one calls a form label and 
associated field a "paragraph" or not. The choice of markup, here 
basically between <p> and (possibly classed) <div>, has little impact - 
some impact on default rendering, and really nothing else. Defining <p> 
one way or another does not change anything.

In the very early days of HTML, the <p> tag stood for paragraph break, 
and this was understood in a simple manner: it causes an empty line to 
be displayed, though it was anticipated that this could be changed with 
a style sheet. Later, an end tag </p> was allowed, and <p> was 
understood as starting a p element.

The <p> element should be defined simply as a block of text, which may 
contain text-level markup but not other markup. It can be informally 
added that <p> can be used to divide text into parts, typically by the 
theme or subject matter, such as paragraphs in prose text.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 8 May 2013 10:52:52 UTC