<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Jul 24, 2007, at 8:48 PM, Kahunapule Michael Johnson wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">You can revert to the rather early HTML form of</font></p> <p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><p> with no </p>, which works fine</font></p> </blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>There are at least two things wrong with this:</div><div>1) It is not xml and won't validate as well-formed xml. Every open tag needs a corresponding end tag or needs to be marked. So you need either <p></p> or <p/>.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>2) It is semantically invalid. There is no content to the paragraph. Remember a processor is free to style a paragraph in any fashion, including ignoring containers without content. (Such as HTML does with an empty <div/>)</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>We are used to html processing producing a blank line between paragraphs. This is a matter of presentation. It is equally valid for a paragraph to start on the next line and be indented. In HTML this would be equivalent to <br/>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Or merely start on the next line. Or as I have seen in one publication, odd number paragraphs have margins shifted by a half inch.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Imagine a culture where paragraphs don't start on a line, but are preceded by one symbol and ended by another, with inter-paragraph markers being elided into a new symbol.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Note: OSIS does not presume any presentational effects with a <p>. It is not the equivalent to HTML's <p>, but rather TEIs. In HTML <p> is a block element. In TEI it is a content element. The difference is that blocks stack and content is merely content.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>See: <a href="http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/CO.html#COPA">http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/CO.html#COPA</a></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>My suggestion to use <lb/> with a type attribute indicating whether it is a substitution for a begin paragraph or an end paragraph allows for the full semantic of <p> and </p> (stylesheets can give whatever meaning they want to either) and gives a nod that most people expect paragraphs to be stacked and visually separated. Thus a processor that is unaware of the type attribute will probably give an expected visual representation.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></body></html>