Agree: empty P, container PP [Was: Hot Metal and HTML ]

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>

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Reply: Murray Maloney: "Re: Agree: empty P, container PP [Was: Hot Metal and HTML ]"

Date: Wed, 15 Jun 94 12:23:37 EDT
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-ig@oclc.org>
Subject: Agree: empty P, container PP [Was: Hot Metal and HTML ]
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In message <9406150919.AA02162@www3.cern.ch>, Tim Berners-Lee writes:
>
>This plan failed, as the SGML tag implication algorithm is not
>strong enough (-Dan).  That is, it can deduce closing
>tags but not opening tags. So the trick will work for <LI>
>and <DT> and <dd> because they all have opening tags, but
>it won't work for <p>.
>
>This means that either
>1. <p> is kept as a separator, maybe with <pp> as a para style container, or
>2. We mandate that HTML parsers have a higher level of tolerance
>   than SGML parsers, in particular they can infer opening tags; or
>2. Text is allowed outside paragraphs as well as inside, as
>   Dave Ragget has suggested for html+; or
>3. The new spec is called HTML+ or HTML2 but not text/html.
>
>These are as I see it the four options open to us as we plot the course of
>WWW history. 

This is an excellent characterization of the situation.

I'm willing to live with option 1 or the second option 2, but not
option 3 or the first option 2.

I suggested option 1 long ago on www-talk

http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/www-talk-1994q2.messages/100.html
message-id:9404071530.AA20967@ulua.hal.com

The problem is how to introduce the PP tag... Information providers
can't be expected to just start writing:

	<h1>head</h1>

	<pp>para 1

	<pp>para 2

	<h2>another head</h2>

today, because it won't "look right" -- no browsers will distinguish
para 1 from para 2. I futher suggested in

http://gummo.stanford.edu/html/hypermail/www-talk-1994q2.messages/109.html
message-id:9404071850.AA21181@ulua.hal.com

that we provide, as a
transition technique, a declaration of PP like:

	<!ELEMENT PP - O (%htext, P?)>

and folks could write:

	<h1>head</h1>

	<pp>para 1<p>

	<pp>para 2

	<h2>another head</h2>

and get interoperability with current browsers.


Dan