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

bbehlen@soda.berkeley.edu (Brian Behlendorf)
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Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 10:48:27 --100
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From: bbehlen@soda.berkeley.edu (Brian Behlendorf)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Fate of <P> [Was: Toward Closure on HTML]
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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