Hi folks,
P5 allows structures such as this:
<div>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<list>
<item>one</item>
<item>two</item>
</list>
<p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
and also this:
<div>
<p>Paragraph text...
<list>
<item>one</item>
<item>two</item>
</list>
... more paragraph text.</p>
</div>
In other words, a list may appear inside a paragraph, or between
paragraphs, in a textual division. The same applies to other block-level
elements such as <lg>.
It's clear to me that in modern texts, lists and linegroups DO appear
inside paragraphs -- in fact, they may appear inside sentences. What I'm
not sure about is whether, in a born digital document, a list or an <lg>
need ever, or should ever, appear BETWEEN paragraphs. In other words,
should the first example above actually be rewritten like this:
<div>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<p>
<list>
<item>one</item>
<item>two</item>
</list>
</p>
<p>Paragraph</p>
</div>
In creating schemas and writing markup guidelines for my straight-to-xml
journal articles, I'm tempted by the simplicity of being able to say
that all of these types of item should only appear inside paragraphs. In
other words, <div> tags can only contain a much smaller range of tags
than at present -- <head>, <epigraph> and <p>, for instance -- while
most of the other block tags such as <list> are forced to appear within
<p> tags. This would certainly simplify processing -- I'd only have to
deal with formatting these tags in the context of <p> tags, rather than
both inside them and between them -- and it would simplify the range of
markup choices available to encoders. But I'm not sure if I'm missing
some obvious use case where a list, for instance, absolutely must be
outside a paragraph. Can anyone see any problems with the
in-paragraph-only approach?
Cheers,
Martin
--
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
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Half-Baked Software, Inc.
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