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

Jukka K. Korpela:
>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.

A reasonable approach to learn how to use something with the name 
hypertext markup language.

>often so that different people use words in different meanings ...

That is a typical for conversation between human beeings.
Words represent only rough ideas - and obviously those ideas
are slightly different in different brains, that is not surprising.
And this is yet another reason, why it can be different as
well, what a chain of thought may contain - and it is quite
common to use old words under slightly different circumstances,
if there are no new words.
I think, especially this works currently pretty good in english,
what is slightly different from the situation for example for
people in a german environment. There it appears currently,
that common english words are used to repesent slightly
new concepts of something. This strategy is often called
anglizism or pseudo-anglizism to introduce such words 
to evoke the impression of technical terms.

But here we can do it the other way around - if it is called
a p(aragraph), best practice is to interprete is as a paragraph,
without assuming a specific technical term.

>I would rather say that it confuses people by elaborating on "semantics" 
>in situations where nobody really needs such "semantic" definitions.

It is difficult to jugde about the needs or even worse the desires of
other people. If some want to indicate, that something is a paragraph,
what is wrong with it? 
If some people believe in it and interprete it strictly as a paragraph, what
is wrong with it? 
The opposite is more problematic, if an author uses the markup for
a paragraph for something else, but the audience interpretes
it as a paragraph due to the markup - usually here the author failed, if
this results in wrong interpretations of his intentions.
But obviously this can be a simplification as well - the author can have
intented it as a paragraph, but the audience nethertheless can have
the wrong interpretation, because they have other ideas in mind.
But the usage of a paragraph can introduce new ideas as well, if
something is indicated as one chain of thought and the audience might
not have expected it as one chain of thought.
If the author puts together apparently different things in one paragraph,
the audience can learn suprising things about the structure of the 
thinking and combination of issues from the point of the author.

And this is the kind of issues, that causes pleasure and employment
for many people to get it approximately right, what others have written
or mentioned. 
Often I'm pretty surprised, what other people put together and learned
already a lot about thinking and structure in other brains and how 
new ideas may appear as a jam of issues, not belonging together before.

Semantic markup can simplify it a litte bit to structure thoughts, the markup
can guide the audience with the indicated structure roughly about
the way, the author expresses ideas.

In doubt the audience can switch to own stylesheets to get the
semantical structure better visible/audible/tactile - because the 
default stylesheet for visual presentation suggested by the  HTML5 
draft especially for new elements  like section, article etc is almost 
useless to guide the audience unfortunately. 
This suggestion for the default stylesheet is a lost chance to promote 
such new elements in HTML5 to be useful and meaningful as a 
p(aragraph) already is.


Olaf

Received on Wednesday, 8 May 2013 15:14:40 UTC