closing paragraphs </p> (Was Re: [Pmwiki-users] Another idea bef..)

[Christian Ridderström]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> A long discussion on <p> and PmWiki markup (feel free to skip)...
> 
> I don't think PmWiki has (or should have) "paragraphs" in the traditional
> sense.  What really exists are blank lines in the markup which the author
> generally wants to become blank lines in the output.  The fact that something
> could be represented by an HTML <p> tag is largely irrelevant as long as
> the output formats correctly.  This is why I'm somewhat in favor of using
> <br /><br /> instead of <p /> to mean "vertical space between elements".

Ok. I'll buy that with a blank line in the markup we mean a vertical 
space, so it doesn't have to implemented as a paragraph. 

Um... if it's only vertical space we want... how about using <div></div> 
instead? Couldn't <br> affect float placements etc?  (Unless this is 
related to not doing <br clear=all> or something like that). But anyway, 
just thought I should mention the <div>-alternative.

Another question: Before, I "understood" that regardless of the n:o blank 
lines, you still got the same vertical space in the output *because* the 
blank lines indicated the start of a new paragraph. What would be the 
motivation now? (Note: I like the current one-or-more blank lines 
become one blank vertical space)

[snip]
> 
> If there's enough interest, I'll implement this in the beta site and
> we can see how it works...

Well, I'd be happy to test it on the beta site to see how it works,
and I'm starting to agree with you that plain <p> is not what we want.

/Christian

PS

If we really wanted to use <p>, we could try something where we
introduce different paragraph classes, e.g. <p class='list-item'> for the paragraph directly on the list item, and <p class='list-par'> for the paragraph 'inside' a list.

I've illustrated some alternatives here:
	http://www.md.kth.se/~chr/par-list.shtml

It looks pretty good to me actually (and degrades gracefully when I deactive the style-sheet, I just get (default) extra vertical space).


-- 
Dr. Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44       http://www.md.kth.se/~chr