OK,<br><br>Time for me to weigh in on this, seeing as my name was invoked way up there.<br><br>Ben has already said it. The way to separate paragraphs in HTML/CSS and in MS Word and probably in many other languages/tools is to specify paragraph spacing. The use of additional paragraphs/linefeeds to visually separate paragraphs that have run-on from a content point of view is not the correct way to do things and usually causes problems further down the line. Witness what is happening here, and what happens when a similar approach is taken in Word documents.
<br><br>So, my requirement was that I be able to control the paragraph space across a range of paragraphs. Specifically, the problems I have been having are because the only way to do this on a single page is to employ DIVs. This is fine except that I want my paragraphs positioned which in turn requires DIVs or tables. End game is they don't mix (nested DIVs or DIVs in tables) and so my requirement, although relatively simple in HTML/CSS is (so far) impossible to achieve in PmWiki.
<br><br>The obvious solution is to allow authors to apply style to individual paragraphs. So, what is the most logical way to do that? The problem is that PmWiki paragraphs are currently all implicit. Hence the various suggestions of how to explicitly specify a paragraph to give a context for styling.
<br><br>Patrick, I can't agree that 'blank lines do not mean "paragraph", they mean "vertical space", which is usually and exactly what the author intended them to mean' because there is currently no other way to create *any* visual gap between two lines of text - no way to create a new paragraph without also creating vertical space.
<br><br>I'm not overly fussed about the specifics of the markup, but I think we need to address the distinction between 'paragraph spacing' and 'vertical space'. I do, however, agree with Ben that blank lines *in the source* can be used to indicate paragraphs. If we can devise a markup to use in that context, there is no reason to change that.
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Allister