Re: feedback on PR-CSS1

On Nov 16,  2:37pm, Steve Knoblock wrote:

> The parent element is the HTML element that contains other elements or text.
> <body> is a element that contains others, like <p>. The paragraph element
> contains text and phrase markup, like <em>. Some elements can legally serve
> as containers and other can not. Some elements are invalid inside other
> elements like <table> inside <p>.

Right.

> This brings up an interesting topic. Most browsers now do not close <p>
> without a </p> tag.

Then they are wrong.

As you say, some things cannot be inside P, like for example another
p or a table. Thus, the presence of such an opening tag means that the
</p> can be inferred and thus need not be typed. It is still there.

> They "nest" everything after the unclosed <p> causing
> havoc with style sheets.

As you say, p can't nest inside another P and things have been this way
for a number of years, and certainly since HTML 2.0

> I now close all my paragraphs, which I like doing
> anyway. I just wish everyone would make up their mind about closing
> <p>.

Everyone did. There is no ambiguity. HTML is designed so that the
closing </P> can be infered in 100% of cases, and thus it can always
be omitted.

Furthermore, it is illegal for a conforming SGML system to treat an
inferred closing tag differently from a real, typed in closing tag.
More generally, this is a legal html 2.0 document:

<title>Hi</title>
<p>A<p>B<p>C<p>D

And this is exactly the same html document

<!doctype html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"><head>
<title>Hi</title></head><body>
<p>A</p>
<p>B</p>
<p>C</p>
<p>D</p></body></html>

HTML requires that these be identical, and CSS1 does nothing to
alter that requirement. Try displaying these in your browser, see
if they look the same ;-)

-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Monday, 18 November 1996 10:27:27 UTC