Re: [XHTML2] Unicode line and paragraph separators

On 4 Apr 2003 at 7:36, Tim wrote:

> And another: Not everything in (X)HTML is inside a paragraph. Some
> elements can appear inside or outside of a paragraph. Using just paragraph
> separators, it is *impossible* to determine whether such an element is
> part of a paragraph or not, unless you impose an otherwise unnecessary
> restriction on exactly where they can be.

And why does (X)HTML need to know whether something is inside of a 
paragraph or not? So that it doesn't include a paragraph, division, or 
section inside of a paragraph. I don't see any other reason that it 
needs to know that, and if a paragraph separator is used instead of 
paragraph markup, then paragraphs, divisions, or sections cannot occur 
inside of a paragraph no matter how the markup is defined.

The main use of <p> in current (X)HTML practice is to apply styling to 
paragraphs. As that is purely a presentational issue, I do not consider 
it significant for deciding whether breaking up text into paragraphs 
should be done by markup or separators. (The need to alter the 
definition of text-indent and to introduce a paragraph spacing 
property, if paragraph breaking was moved from being done by markup to 
being done by a format character was why I included the www-style list 
in my original post, but since we aren't discussing that right now, I 
agree with your decision to strip it from the addresses for now.)

The only objective reason I can see for favoring <p> over &ps; would be 
based on how often authors would need to use a construction such as:
  <div>
     First Paragraph
  </div><div>
     Second Paragraph
  </div>
because they need to be able to address individual paragraph elements 
for whatever reasons they consider significant in the event that &ps; 
was the chosen mechanism.  The frequency of such a need that causes <p> 
to be the favored option is subjective, but could be debated if the 
data were available.

I repeat my earlier query: Is there somewhere a representative set of 
current (X)HTML pages that could be used to make such a determination 
of how often the <p> element is used for reasons in addition to 
breaking text up into paragraphs?

Received on Friday, 4 April 2003 11:38:37 UTC