RE: Ignoring empty paragraphs

On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, Braden N. McDaniel wrote
> > .........
> > 
> > Yes. But they don't. And they never will do so it's not really relevant/
> 
> It's absolutely relevant. The spec permits it. You can't handwave it away
> saying, "That'll never happen." The spec allows it to happen. It could
> happen.
> 
> But if the idea of this occuring in a UA style sheet is just too
> far-fetched for you, perhaps considering this in the user style sheet will
> bring it down to earth? The effect is the same.
> 
> > > > Granted, this is an edge case. But the bottom line is that your assertion
> > > > that an "empty" pseudo-class is unnecessary hinges on unspecified
> > > > behavior.
> > 
> > Something is necessary if it is useful. It seems that the reason that
> > this is wanted is for sanctimonious reasons of 'Thou shalt not produce
> > tag soup'.
> 
> The "empty" pseudo-class has been suggested because, if the clause in
> question in the HTML 4 spec refers to document *display* (styling) rather
> than *interpretation*, we have a case where CSS does not fulfill the
> formatting requirements of HTML 4.
> 
> > As such the pseudo-class is useless. No-one would use it.
> 
> *If* this is a style issue, browser authors creating HTML browsers using
> a CSS style system ought to be using something like this.
> 


Thank you, Braden, for an excellent summary.  Given that Mozilla [1] 
(apparently) and Tasman [2] (definitely)  have to implement special CSS
code extensions to deal with empty paragraphs, it would seem sensible to        
introduce a standards-based way of dealing with this. In particular, if   
this is a layout issue for HTML, it will also be relevant to XML layout.

Ian
--   
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Apr/0114.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Apr/0115.html

Received on Thursday, 13 April 2000 10:44:15 UTC