[pmwiki-users] RFC: Eliminating <p class='vspace'></p>

[Patrick R. Michaud]

After 2+ years of making essentially the same arguments 
over and over again about the <p class='vspace'></p> tags in 
output (and coming to the same conclusions each time), I find 
I'm weary of the ongoing struggle and just want it to go away.


So, let's eliminate <p class='vspace'></p>, even if it
screws things up.


Here's the proposal I'm currently playing with:

  - There will no longer be any <p class='vspace'></p> in the output.

  - "Bare" text that follows a blank line and is not associated with
    any block-level markup becomes <p class='vspace'>...text...</p>.

  - Bare text not associated with block level markup that does *not*
    follow a blank line becomes a simple <p>...text...</p>.  
    (Perhaps we'll put a class= designator on this as well -- I 
    just can't come up with a good name at the moment.)

  - Other blank lines in the markup (e.g., in lists) produce 
    <div class='vspace'><div> to generate vertical whitespace 
    (controlled by the $HTMLVSpace variable).  

Some likely consequences of this proposal:

1.  Because "paragraph text" will be producing either <p> 
    or <p class='vspace'>, the wikistyles.php code will have to be
    substantially modified in order to properly apply styles to
    paragraphs containing a class= attribute.  (Is this okay,
    John?  I'll be glad to help with any side effects to
    wikipublisher.php.)

2.  The use of <div class='vspace'></div> may cause vertical
    spacing to break in some older browsers (I think that IE 4
    and IE 5 are affected by this).

3.  Allister and other authors will be able to achieve the effect 
    he needs by using markup like:

        Here is some text

        %p margin-top:0.5em% More text

        %p margin-top:0.5em% Still more text

    Similarly, an author can do:

        %center% This is a paragraph with centered text.

        %p margin-top:0% This is another paragraph immediately
        beneath the previous one and left justified.

4.  This proposal does not necessarily invalidate the earlier
    proposal for an explicit paragraph markup -- my comments regarding
    the potential usefulness of starting a new paragraph without 
    requiring a blank space still apply.

5.  Because this is a fairly substantial change that can
    impact existing skins and sites, the release containing 
    these changes should perhaps be given a new major release
    number -- i.e., 2.2.0.

6.  For those sites that need it, there will be an option of
    some sort to cause PmWiki to revert to its existing 2.1.x
    behavior of using <p class='vspace'></p>.

Comments welcome.

Pm