Re: Ignoring empty paragraphs

On Mon, 3 Apr 2000 19:53:18 -0400 (EDT), "L. David Baron"
<dbaron@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

>Section 9.3.1 of the HTML spec [1] says "User agents should ignore
>empty P elements."  I am curious what the authors of this line intended
>it to mean...

> 1) An empty P element should be ignored at the parsing stage, and
>    therefore should not appear in the DOM and should not be affected
>    by style sheets.

This is the correct interpretation.

The purpose of markup is to provide structure to content, i.e. a final
marked up document shall appear as a serialized representation of a
structure where we have "content embedded in markup". (nota bene, not
the other way around, because that would be "tag soup" :)

If there's nothing to mark-up, there's no motivation for markup either.

-- 
Jan Roland Eriksson <jrexon@newsguy.com>
<URL:http://member.newsguy.com/%7Ejrexon/>

Received on Monday, 3 April 2000 21:14:35 UTC