Paragraphs Elements as Containers

Thu May 11 01:35:44 PDT 1995

Robert Seymour <robert_seymour at il.us.swissbank.com>:
 > The use of standalone paragraph descriptors should be only to
 > separate one   paragraph from another in sucession.  They should
 > not be used (in a   generalized sense) to initiate or to end a
 > paragraph unless they are used as   a container.

I don't think that's quite correct, at least according to the level 2 HTML  
element reference at
	http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/L2Pindex.html
That document has the following entry for <p>
----
     P 

    Required Parts 

    <P>characters... 

    All Parts 

    <P>characters...  <A>   <IMG>   <BR>   <EM>   <STRONG>   <CODE>   <SAMP>  

    <KBD>   <VAR>   <CITE>   <TT>   <B>   <I>  </P> 

----
Note that the opening tag is required, whilst the closing tag </p> is optional  
(at least, that's how I read the entry).

Thus, in a sequence such as
 <body>
 This is paragraph 1.
 This is paragraph 2.
 This is paragraph 3.
 </body>
the s should be interpreted as containers, with missing closing tags. A 
browser should infer the closing tags (since a cannot contain a ).

Basically, the interpretation of as a paragraph separator is now 
deprecated.

--
Stephen Fitzpatrick, Department of Computer Science,
Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, N. Ireland.
S.Fitzpatrick at cs.qub.ac.uk (ASCII, NeXT, maybe MIME)
PGP key via WWW: <URL:http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/~S.Fitzpatrick/>