[pmwiki-users] RFC: Core candidate offerings

Allister Jenks arj at zkarj.co.nz
Sat Apr 1 02:29:19 CST 2006


On 4/1/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> HTML's definition of the <p> tag says that it is not allowed to
> contain other block markup, such as <li> or <pre>.  Semantically
> this is equivalent to saying that an author is not allowed to
> place a list, quotation, or display in the middle of a sentence
> or paragraph.


I'd never really looked at it that way before, but now that I do, I see you
are right.  What <p> really ends up meaning in HTML is 'a chunk of text with
no embedded block elements'.  And of course the whole philosophy behind HTML
(and which so many users/designers have forgotten over the years) is that it
is semantic.

> But, at the end of the day, if there is some way of influencing the amount
> > of space even at a page level (but preferably per paragraph) then we
> will
> > have solved the problem and can move on.
>
> There is already a way to do it at the page level -- just
> define a per-page stylesheet that changes the .vspace margin
> to whatever you prefer that page to have.  :-)
>
> For that matter, you can do it for just parts of a page using
> a >>div<<:


Ah, see therein lies a rub.  That's fine so long as one doesn't mind digging
in to the CSS.  But that's really not 'author friendly' is it?

> Perhaps when the successor to HTML arrives we can
> > look at this again.  :-)
>
> Well, XHTML 2.0 is already being defined, and notably it fixes
> the <p> tag so that it's allowed to contain block elements,
> tacitly admitting the mistake that was made in HTML.


Dead giveaway huh?

So, what we're really waiting on is widespread adoption of
> XHTML 2.0.  But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it...
>

Well, proper adoption of CSS 1 is almost there now and that's only been
about 8 years.  :-)

And IE7 will supposedly manage transparent PNG images - how long has that
been?

--
Allister
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/pmwiki-users/attachments/20060401/e3c2614c/attachment.html 


More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list