RE: [docbook-apps] Re: Paragraph content model

["David Cramer" <dcramer@motive.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Norman Walsh [mailto:ndw@nwalsh.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2008 7:39 AM
> To: Dave Pawson
> Cc: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [docbook-apps] Re: Paragraph content model
> 
> / 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.

Content reuse (e.g. through xinclude) is one use case that comes to mind
where the current model is better. You don't want to have to add three
xincludes to get the stuff before the table, the table, and the stuff
after the table. If there were something like a <div>, it wouldn't be so
important. 

David