Re: Paragraph content model

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Dave Pawson <davep@dpawson.co.uk> was heard to say:
| Norman Walsh wrote:
|> / Dave Pawson <davep@dpawson.co.uk> was heard to say:
|> | I wonder what the original reason was, unless it was M$ type of pressure
|> | to have everything everywhere.
|>
|> See http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/para.html :-)
|>
|> But more helpfully, consider the following example:
|>
|>   There are times when it may be necessary to frob the foobar. These
|>   can be summarized as follows:
|>
|>     <some table goes here>
|>
|>   where anything that falls outside the boundaries of column 1 must
|>   be considered an error.
|>
|> Logically, that's a single paragraph with a table in the middle. To
|> mark that up as two paragraphs with a table in between fails to
|> capture what the author intended.
|>
|> Years of struggling with HTML has mostly trained me not to write that
|> way, or not to worry about the mangled markup that results from making
|> that three sibling elements, but it's still a rational markup model.
|
| I'm probably being 'too strict' /picky, but two paragraphs and a table
| seems right to me (and is what I'd do).

Sure, but if you do that, you also have to rewrite the two paragraphs
so that they stand alone, yes? It's surely very bad style to introduce
a paragraph break in the middle of a sentence (poetry and literature
excepted, perhaps).

At the end of the day, I don't think there's a technical argument to
be made here. Some authors absolutely think paragraphs can contain
block structures, some don't.

| Just an observation.
| If the current simpara content had been in para and a new
| 'messy' / complex model presented (complexpara for want of a better
| name) then I'd have ignored complexpara and used the para.

Alas, we crossed that bridge sixteen years ago.

| [Or I could start using docbook-- with the content model of simpara
| substituted for para]

Sure. That's a perfectly reasonable subset of DocBook.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Wandering in a vast forest at night, I
http://nwalsh.com/            | have only a faint light to guide me. A
                              | stranger appears and says to me: "My
                              | friend, you should blow out your candle
                              | in order to find your way more
                              | clearly." This man is a theologian.--
                              | Diderot

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