Everyone,

This may have been discussed in the past, but if so I don't see it in
the list archives.

There's a major difference in the content model of TEI and (X)HTML when
it comes to block-level elements. In TEI, they can generally be nested;
in HTML, they cannot.

Legal TEI:  <p>As someone said: <quote>blah blah</quote> and so on.</p>
Legal HTML: <p>As someone said:</p><blockquote>blah blah</blockquote>
            <p>and so on.</p>

Obviously this causes big headaches if your goal is to generate valid
HTML from valid TEI documents. I'm guessing that most of us just figure
that the HTML content model is stupid in this respect and that browsers
know how to handle nested block elements, and therefore in
transformation stylesheets we just turn <quote> into <blockquote>
regardless of whether or not it's inside a <p> or between them. (The
alternative requires horrible incantations involving <xsl:text
disable-output-escaping="yes"> to close and open tags, and such like.)

Someone once put it succinctly to me: "If it's not the archival form of
the document, don't agonize over validity." Reasonable? Is it time for a
position paper, "Valid HTML Considered Harmful"? Or do you still feel a
pang of guilt if you're proclaiming markup standards with the right hand
and sending out Web pages that flunk the W3C validator test with the
left?

DS

--
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
Electronic Imprint, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400318, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: [log in to unmask]   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://www.ei.virginia.edu/