Re: Ignoring empty paragraphs

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000 13:46:07 -0700, Matthew Brealey
(webmaster@richinstyle.com) wrote:
> 
> > >it introduces a gap of about 1em, depending on your browser's
> > >setting for margins on <p>.
> > 
> > It does _not_ in Mozilla M14 "strict" mode.
> > (yes, I did try exactly your line up here before posting :)
> 
> That's a bug - it doesn't ignore the Ps here:
> 
> http://richinstyle.com/test/application/sibling2.html
> 
> so by any interpretation of the spec this is wrong.

As I said in my original post [1], Mozilla's current approach is
between the two I described.  I believe the current implementation is
that the empty P elements are put into the DOM tree and the CSS layout
code has special rules built in for HTML P elements.  (These rules
don't lead to completely ignoring empty p elements, since a "<p></p>"
in the middle of a block still does cause a line break).  I'm not sure
that one can argue that this is wrong, considering the vagueness of the
statement mentioned in [1] from section 9.3.1 of HTML.

I don't really like this behavior either.  However, without an
authoritative statement from the authors of that statement about it's
intent (as Braden mentioned in [2]), I don't think I'd be able to (or
should) convince others to change this behavior.

-David

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Apr/0024.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Apr/0085.html

L. David Baron    Sophomore, Harvard (Physics)    dbaron@fas.harvard.edu
Links, SatPix, CSS, etc.     <URL: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >
WSP CSS AC                      <URL: http://www.webstandards.org/css/ >

Received on Tuesday, 11 April 2000 12:46:00 UTC