Re: Structure of Paragraphs in HTML/XHTML

Laurie Brown, on 2002-04-15, wrote:

> <p>A few introductory sentences...
> 	<blockquote>The quote...</blockquote>
> A few concluding sentences...</p>
>
> However, the strict HTML and XHTML DTDs do not allow for such a structure.
> Instead, by their rules, the above paragraph would have to be tagged as
> follows:
>
> <p>A few introductory sentences...</p>
>
> <blockquote>The quote...</blockquote>
>
> <p>A few concluding sentences...</p>
>
> While this looks OK with the current default behavior of browsers--i.e.,
> skipping a line between before and after elements denoted as paragraphs--it
> may not in the future depending on rendering styles.  In addition, it does
> not seem to me to be semantically correct.  The idea that this information
> goes together to express a single thought has now been lost.

I agree that it is unfortunate that many block-level elements cannot be
nested inside of other block elements.  You might want to consider using a
<div> to contain everything ad-hoc collections.  It is fairly semantically
dry, but it might be the closest thing you can do.

Of course, rendering issues are an entire other issue, for
www-style@w3.org (sp?).

-- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/

Received on Thursday, 18 April 2002 14:06:22 UTC