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Date

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Kent Feiler

12-14-2006

Rik

Ed Seedhouse

Harlan Messinge...

Andy Dingley

Kent Feiler

Andy Dingley

Posted by Kent Feiler on December 14, 2006, 9:40 pm

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I wonder if <p> should be included in the list of devalued html tags.
As far as I can see it's nothing more than a <div> followed by a
<br /> and it has the big disadvantage that <p> forces a following
blank line which is often not what you want in writing. You can't, at
least not in an obvious way, produce dialogue such as:

xxxxx yyyyyyy zzzzzzzzz aaaaaaaaaa
bb ccccccccc ddddddddd eeeeeeeeeee
ffffffff gggggggg hhhhhh iiiiiiiiiii
jjjjjjjjj kkkkkkkkkkk lllllllll mmmmm
nnnnnnnnnnn oooooooo ppppppppppp
qqqqqqqqqqqq rrrrrrrrrr

sssssssss ttttttttttt uuuuuuu vvvvvvv
wwwwwwwwww

...using <p></p> tags around the first three paragraphs. <div></div>
however with some CSS including say, "text-indent:2em;" for the second
two <div>s does it easily.

So what's the story with <p>? Is it just a "legacy" tag, or is there
something else?

Regards,

Kent Feiler
www.KentFeiler.com

Posted by Rik on December 14, 2006, 10:03 pm

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Kent Feiler wrote:

> I wonder if <p> should be included in the list of devalued html tags.

> As far as I can see it's nothing more than a <div> followed by a

> <br /> and it has the big disadvantage that <p> forces a following

> blank line which is often not what you want in writing.

It does not. Use css, and there will be no 'blank line'. It's just default
rendering in most browsers if you haven't defined the margins by hand. In
normal text, a 'blank line' is very common between paragraphs, hence the
default. Should you wish to change it (I wouldn't): you're free to do so.

A <p> is obviously the better choice, as it states what kind of content it
holds. A <div> is anonymous, and could hold anything.

> ...using <p></p> tags around the first three paragraphs. <div></div>

> however with some CSS including say, "text-indent:2em;" for the second

> two <div>s does it easily.

Well:
p
p + p

No problem (if MSIE understood sibliung selectors...)
--
Rik Wasmus

Posted by Ed Seedhouse on December 14, 2006, 11:21 pm

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>I wonder if <p> should be included in the list of devalued html tags.

>As far as I can see it's nothing more than a <div> followed by a

><br /> and it has the big disadvantage that <p> forces a following

>blank line which is often not what you want in writing. You can't, at

>least not in an obvious way, produce dialogue such as:

>So what's the story with <p>? Is it just a "legacy" tag, or is there

>something else?

Far from it, in fact you have it pretty well backward. P is a
semantically meaningful tag indicating the contents are a paragraph. You
need to do a little research on the idea of semantic meaningul html.

Div on the other hand has no semantic meaning as such and is merely
designed as a grouping element to contain block elements for stylein and
positioning purposes.

When marking up content you shouldn't worry about the way it looks, but
it's meaning. You separate markup from style. HTML is for semantic
markup and CSS is for styling. Your objection to P is merely a styling
issue - if you don't like the way the element is displayed in browsers,
style it to look the way you want it.

Posted by Harlan Messinger on December 15, 2006, 9:08 am

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Kent Feiler wrote:

> I wonder if <p> should be included in the list of devalued html tags.

> As far as I can see it's nothing more than a <div> followed by a

> <br /> and it has the big disadvantage that <p> forces a following

> blank line which is often not what you want in writing. You can't, at

> least not in an obvious way, produce dialogue such as:

> xxxxx yyyyyyy zzzzzzzzz aaaaaaaaaa

> bb ccccccccc ddddddddd eeeeeeeeeee

> ffffffff gggggggg hhhhhh iiiiiiiiiii

> jjjjjjjjj kkkkkkkkkkk lllllllll mmmmm

> nnnnnnnnnnn oooooooo ppppppppppp

> qqqqqqqqqqqq rrrrrrrrrr

> sssssssss ttttttttttt uuuuuuu vvvvvvv

> wwwwwwwwww

> ...using <p></p> tags around the first three paragraphs. <div></div>

> however with some CSS including say, "text-indent:2em;" for the second

> two <div>s does it easily.

Sure, and you can do without heading tags <h1> through <h6> by just
using <div> and setting the fonts. And you can make a list without the
<ul> and <li> tags by just using tables and a bunch of bullet
characters. But that's missing the point.

HTML markup isn't about making the page look a particular way. It's
about describing the makeup of your page, because that information is
useful to browsers, to search engines, and so on. Browsers have a
default presentation for each bit of HTML markup; they put a margin on
<p> elements, for example, because it's a reasonable default
presentation, not because there's a rule that defines <p> to mean "skip
a line". The margin doesn't even have to *be* the equivalent of exactly
one blank line.

CSS is used to set the appearance differently from the browser's
default. You can use it to indent your paragraphs, space them
differently from browser defaults, make the first letter three times as
large, etc.

Posted by Andy Dingley on December 15, 2006, 10:49 am

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Kent Feiler wrote:

> I wonder if <p> should be included in the list of devalued html tags.

What does "devalued" mean? Is that like <blockquote>, where it's
mis-used as "indent" by so many people that the real function becomes
obscured?

I suspect you mean "deprecated", in which case no.

<p> is a crucial part of HTML 1.0(sic) onwards. HTML is still a text
markup lannguage whose priimary function is to describe the structure
of text documents. Deprecating such a significant part of it would be a
massive structural shift, both in terms of change of meaning and also
as a legacy maintenance problem for existing pages. There's also no
benefot to doing it.

> As far as I can see it's nothing more than a <div> followed by a

> <br />

No, it's quite different to that. Particularly it's different to "a
<foo> followed by a <br>". Study more carefully just what a <br> means
- it's an inline element, not a block. <div> doesn't need to be
followed by <br>, just the <div> itself implies a break afterwards
quite sufficiently on its own.

<p> is also more semantically specific than <div>. Yes, you can replace
every <p> by <div> and still have a valid HTML document that looks
identical. However you've also lost _meaning_ here: <p> doesn't just
mean "lump of text" or even "block-shaped lump of stuff", it actually
means "A language text structure that can bre treated as a paragraph".
One word <p> blocks are fairly common, and they're not even wrong in a
simply HTML context, but they're not linguistically as meaningful, nor
are they as good practice for markup. Keep <p> for paragraphs and use
<div> (as indeed you suggest) for the others.

> the big disadvantage that <p> forces a following

> blank line which is often not what you want in writing.

It does no such thing -- learn some CSS

> ...using <p></p> tags around the first three paragraphs. <div></div>

> however with some CSS including say, "text-indent:2em;" for the second

> two <div>s does it easily.

That's just because your default stylesheet renders them that way.
Learn to write a CSS stylesheet and you can make <p> do it too.

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