Re: Fate of <P> [Was: Toward Closure on HTML]

Brian Behlendorf (bbehlen@soda.berkeley.edu)
Fri, 8 Apr 1994 01:44:48 -0700

One thing I haven't seen made clear, at least from my perspective, is
the need for a paragraph container. Maybe it's just that I don't know
SGML well enough to see the benefits when approached from that angle,
but since it has from the beginning always been considered a separator,
and has been used by most people successfully as such, why change it
now?

I fully understand the presentation vs. structure argument - but I'm
not convinced everything needs to be contained within descriptive
tagged areas to placate the structuralists.

Maybe a better argument would be... is there ever a situation where
it can't successfully be inferred? There is obviously a set of
tags which will never appear between a <P> and a </P> (like <H*>,
<FORM...>, <*L>, etc.) so it seems to me like </P> would be
redundant.

Or maybe I'm just worried about the 500 HTML pages I'd have to update
to account for this </P> daemon. I already have enough fun maintaining
two versions of every form, one for SGI's with broken X servers, one
for everyone else. :)

Brian