one author's perspective on HTML (a modest proposal)

Philip Greenspun (philg@martigny.ai.mit.edu)
Wed, 9 Feb 1994 21:49:11 --100


I have been thinking the same thing for some time (I would be surprised
if this hasn't come up before) and it's really needed. I have to
disagree with the <NOVEL> tag though; the usefulness of no spaces between
paragraphs is much more general. I was thinking of an expansion of the
<P> tag, something like

<PI> for Paragraph (just indent) and
<PS> for Paragrah (followed by a space)

and naturally <P> would be interpreted as <PS> for backward compatability.

What do you think?

Your mechanism is more general and therefore pretty winning. However,
we'd also need <PSI> (blank line PLUS indent the first text line) to
accomplish the "break in story" idea you saw in my first msg.

I think your idea is great, although I frankly think that the whole
HTML concept needs to import some ideas from (gasp) Microshaft Word,
et al.

Philip