Re: CENTER element [Was: Netscape & New HTML]

Joe English (jenglish@crl.com)
Thu, 27 Oct 1994 18:24:54 -0700


Lou Montulli <montulli@strumpet.mcom.com> wrote:

> On Oct 25, 3:13pm, Tony Sanders wrote:
> > My, how quickly history is rewritten; <P> has never marked the end of a
> > paragraph. The rule was that <P>'s and </P>'s should be implied where
> > they are obvious.
>
> That's not true. The original CERN spec, which BTW never included
> a DTD, specified <p> as a paragraph separator and never had a </p>.

Which was, in retrospect, a very bad idea.

> Trying to make <p> into a container now IS rewritting history and
> breaks many current implementations, and in my opionion is a very
> bad idea. We should try and write the spec to coexist peacefully
> with existing practice rather than breaking everything and forceing
> rewrites.

Making <P> a container instead of a separator
breaks very few existing documents. (It may
break old implementations, but so will anything
new. Adding <IMG>, <FORM>, and <CENTER> "broke"
old implementations in the same way.)

Text outside of paragraphs is still legal, it's just
not recommended. <P> as a container *makes more sense*
and will prove to be more useful in the long run.

--Joe English

jenglish@crl.com

Container, container, container!