Kris <kr*******@xs4all.netherlands> wrote:
I have to
admit that I hold a fairly liberal view on what is a Paragraph or
not. To me, a paragraph is either clearly one, or a block of
content when nothing better applies. Only after I also outrule it
as a P, it becomes a DIV. I see it as the 'almost'-last
alternative.
But why would you ever outrule P, if you think that it can be any block
of content?
I'd suggest consulting some dictionary definitions for "paragraph",
like "a subdivision of a written composition that consists of one or
more sentences, deals with one point or gives the words of one speaker,
and begins on a new usually indented line".
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?paragraph
You could also ask whether you would welcome browsers and other
software that treat P elements paragraphs as defined for literary works
traditionally. Or would it be a threat that some browsers would present
P elements _in their own ways_ as appropriate for a particular
rendering situation? For example, a program could
- make a clear pause when reading the page
- obey the user's command for moving to the next paragraph
- leave space before and after each paragraph, as browsers have
traditionally done for some odd reason
- use "literary paragraph" style, with no vertical spacing but with
first line of each paragraph indented when it immediately follows
another paragraph
- treat the content as a unit when performing some linguistic analysis
of paragraph structures on Web pages.
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html