Paragraphs Elements as Containers
Robert Seymour
robert_seymour at il.us.swissbank.com
Sun May 7 14:52:23 PDT 1995
In parsing a paragraph element, omniweb does not distinguish between the use
of a paragraph tag pair as a container and a paragraph tag stadalone as a new
paragraph descriptor. The two uses are (for example):
<p>This is my paragraph in a container.</p>
This is my paragraph using an ending tag only.<p>
In each case shown above, the paragraph break should be inserted after the
end of the sentence. However, OmniWeb will insert the paragraph break
wherever the <p> tag occurs, and ignore the presence of the </p> paragraph
container ending tag. As a consequent of this parsing, OmniWeb may induce
paragraph breaks in inappropriate situations. A simple example would be:
<ul>
<li><p>A list item.</p>
</ul>
(Now, the studious among you will note that this HTML instance does not
conform to the SGML DTD for HTML 2.0 (or 3.0), but I just wanted an easy
example for us to look at. I'm sure you can imagine other cases with similar
results.) In this case, OmniWeb would draw a bullet element, break the end
of line and place the text "A list item." on the next line of the screen.
What it has done is to interpret the <p> as the end of a paragraph, ignoring
the </p>. This is contrary to the directions for using paragraph elements in
Raggett's and TBL's RFCs/DDs (as I understand them). Are there any plans to
fix this and have OmniWeb do a look-ahead for a </p> before inserting a
paragraph break at a <p> element?
On an extension to this question, will OmniWeb parse align arguments to the
paragraph tag (e.g.: <p align="justify">)? While not as useful as text
wrapping around images, it should be fairly trivial to add on and does not
require hacking the text object.
Regards, Robert
--
Robert Seymour seymour at il.us.swissbank.com
Swiss Bank Corporation (NeXTMail, MIME, PGP accepted)
Internal Web: <URL:http://sbcweb/~seymour/>
Internet Web: <URL:http://www.reed.edu/~rseymour/>
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