["Daniel W. Connolly": Re: That old <p> tag again ]

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
Message-id: <9406101612.AA07785@ulua.hal.com>
To: html-ig@oclc.org
Subject: ["Daniel W. Connolly": Re: That old <p> tag again ]
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 1994 11:12:33 -0500
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
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To: alanb@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Alan Braverman)
Subject: Re: That old <p> tag again 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 30 May 1994 09:40:57 CDT."
             <9405301440.AA05033@void.ncsa.uiuc.edu> 
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Date: Wed, 08 Jun 1994 17:34:11 -0500
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@ulua>

In message <9405301440.AA05033@void.ncsa.uiuc.edu>, Alan Braverman writes:
>  We are not too thrilled with the redefinition of the <p> tag as a
>container, and I saved a few of your arguments from www-talk for support.
>Problem is, you seem to have switched sides in the debate.  Mind if I ask
>why?

P as a separator was a hack from day 1. I'm sure that timbl was
looking at documents used in systems that supported markup
minimization when he got the idea for the P tag.

In the code he wrote, it worked like the \par control in RTF.
You could say that is a valid design precedent, and P should
remain a separator.

But there is value in having a paragraph container element.
It's provides a much more straightforward
way to say "this paragraph should be blue"
in stylesheets, or to say "find FOO and BAR in the same
paragraph".

I argued that the name P was already out there, and
that it's not nice to change the meaining of names
that are already out there.
I suggested that if we're going to change the semantics, we
should change the name -- migrate to a PP tag, or some such.

But nobody liked that idea. So here we are...

Dan


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