Re: [XHTML2] Unicode line and paragraph separators

Although in general I disagree with Earnest Cline's
position /in re/ <p> .. </p> v. &ps;, I do feel he 
has a valid point when he writes L

> Actually, the sentence is the most basic structural unit of prose
> composition, and it has no markup associated with it. What is there
> about paragraphs in general that makes it important to be marked up,
> while the sentence is not? 

There is little doubt in my mind that even the most pure of purist
logical markup advocates have, somewhere in the deepest recesses
of their minds, some anticipation of how their carefully-marked-up
text will appear after styling by some rendering agent.  They probably
care not one jot whether new paras are indented or set off by 
vertical white space, but they do want them to appear as clearly
discernible paras rather than as /ad hoc/ text.  But surely those
same purists also want their sentences to appear as sentences,
and -- in those environments or locales where extra space is
traditionally added after the final period of a sentence -- I would 
imagine that they would rather like different typographic
treatment of the periods in "J. R. R. Tolkien" to the treatment
of the period at the end of this sentence.  Thus I would support
M. Cline's argument that <sentence> ... </sentence> is arguably
as important as <p> ... </p>, even though HTML has ignored the
concept ever since its inception.

Philip Taylor, RHBNC

Received on Monday, 7 April 2003 13:10:43 UTC