Why choose a paragraph element for a paragraph?

D

dorayme

Why should a *practical* website maker choose a paragraph element for a
paragraph?

As far as I can work out, for no *other* reason than that the P element
is associated in browsers with ready made styles that humans can
recognise as indicating a paragraph. So it saves bother! Easier than
fashioning styles for a DIV.

Much easier to trim a hedge than grow one in the first place. And pretty
well the same thing goes for all other elements.

Imagining that the paragraph as it exists in the HTML is somehow free of
presentation is like imagining walking out of the house nude knowing the
door is rigged to trigger clothes to magically cover your loveliness.

"I'm going to walk out nude" is not very brave under these
circumstances.
 
R

rf

dorayme said:
Why should a *practical* website maker choose a paragraph element for
a paragraph?

Because it's a paragraph.
As far as I can work out, for no *other* reason than that the P
element is associated in browsers with ready made styles that humans
can recognise as indicating a paragraph. So it saves bother! Easier
than fashioning styles for a DIV.

Do aural browsers pause, say, between divs, as they might beween paragraphs?
Did you do all of your homework on that 'fashion" stuff?

You really must get some sleep girl. You have been playing around in those
pissing contests over at AWW for far too long. You are beginning to sound
just like RtS.
 
H

Harlan Messinger

dorayme said:
Why should a *practical* website maker choose a paragraph element for a
paragraph?

As far as I can work out, for no *other* reason than that the P element
is associated in browsers with ready made styles that humans can
recognise as indicating a paragraph. So it saves bother! Easier than
fashioning styles for a DIV.

That's backwards. If it weren't for the sense that text is decomposable
into paragraphs, there wouldn't be any motivation to *display* text in
the form of visibly separate paragraphs. The P element, like all the
other elements, then, exists, because the whole purpose of HTML, as that
of SGML, is to represent the structure of a document.
Much easier to trim a hedge than grow one in the first place. And pretty
well the same thing goes for all other elements.

Imagining that the paragraph as it exists in the HTML is somehow free of
presentation is like imagining walking out of the house nude knowing the
door is rigged to trigger clothes to magically cover your loveliness.

"I'm going to walk out nude" is not very brave under these
circumstances.

Yes, everyone assumes that a visual presentation of a marked up document
will make use of the markup to provide a presentation that clarifies the
structure of the document. The structure is still what the HTML
represents, and the presentation is then the choice of the browser, the
author, and/or the user.
 
C

C A Upsdell

dorayme said:
Why should a *practical* website maker choose a paragraph element for a
paragraph?

As far as I can work out, for no *other* reason than that the P element
is associated in browsers with ready made styles that humans can
recognise as indicating a paragraph. So it saves bother! Easier than
fashioning styles for a DIV.

Do as you please. We don't care. Your visitors may, but we don't care
about *your* visitors.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

dorayme said:
Why should a *practical* website maker choose a paragraph element for a
paragraph?

As far as I can work out, for no *other* reason than that the P element
is associated in browsers with ready made styles that humans can
recognise as indicating a paragraph. So it saves bother! Easier than
fashioning styles for a DIV.

Because the text within has the function|identity of a paragraph as
opposed to some other block of text, heading, caption, address. I would
use DIV for a generic block like a phrase or text fragment. Let's use
the old house analogy.

A stud is just a 2x4, just as a P is just a block element like a DIV;
but a *stud* has a specific structural function as opposed to the
generic *board*. A *stud* conveys the board's purpose or function.

Now generally a stud will be "styled" as a 2x4 @ 92" long just as a P
has a basic default style. A stud may be a 2x6 or a 2x8 like a joist or
rafter but the function is not the same just as a P may have larger text
like a H2 or H3 but their functions are different.
 
D

dorayme

Harlan Messinger said:
That's backwards. If it weren't for the sense that text is decomposable
into paragraphs, there wouldn't be any motivation to *display* text in
the form of visibly separate paragraphs. The P element, like all the
other elements, then, exists, because the whole purpose of HTML, as that
of SGML, is to represent the structure of a document.

I am starting, in this thread, to keep things simple and manageable,
with the assumption that there are paragraphs to be marked up. That this
is a *settled* question. You are talking other and interesting and
possibly deeper questions about whole document structure.

It could be a settled question where, to take an example, the website
maker is given an established author's work to be marked up and he is
not expected to second guess what the paragraphs should be or even much
else in some cases.

Just from this perspective, there is the good reason I mention, to use a
paragraph element for paragraphs. Seems transparent and easy to
understand in itself.

A lot of website design work is rather like this in that much of the
units are obviously paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, pictures. How
to organise these units, even to alter their nature under structural
pressures is a different, more complicated question. How to assign the
order of headings is an important structural matter. I suspect that
presentational matters are part and parcel of this too. Not for no
reason does HTML order count a lot (author CSS unavailable). And it
counts in a seriously presentational way. But I am not arguing this
right now.
Yes, everyone assumes that a visual presentation of a marked up document
will make use of the markup to provide a presentation that clarifies the
structure of the document. The structure is still what the HTML
represents, and the presentation is then the choice of the browser, the
author, and/or the user.

Nothing I say, I hope you know, is particularly intended to be confined
to visual presentation.

The structure may well be what the HTML represents in some sense. But
what does a humble part represent? It represents a paragraph (to take a
case). And this means something quite transparent, it is a laser mark
that browsers use, because of their defaults styles, to communicate the
paragraph to humans in such a way that they can see it is a paragraph.
The story that you want to tell about what the HTML represents does not
come into the matter directly. Browsers do not understand structure or
content in any other way than stimulus/style response.
 
D

David Segall

dorayme said:
Why should a *practical* website maker choose a paragraph element for a
paragraph?

As far as I can work out, for no *other* reason than that the P element
is associated in browsers with ready made styles that humans can
recognise as indicating a paragraph. So it saves bother!

Saving bother is a side effect. The central idea behind HTML and any
other SGML derived mark up language is that a "document" has a
structure that is independent of the contents of the document and the
elements of that structure can be given names like "paragraph",
"heading", "chapter" etc. If an author marks the document with the
correct names and adheres to the Document Type Definition then a
publisher can easily write a program to format the document to the
publisher's preferred style.

You should be able to submit the same SGML text as a W3C Working Draft
or an article for "Inside Film" and have their respective computers
convert it to look like every other article they publish.
 
D

dorayme

C A Upsdell said:
Do as you please. We don't care. Your visitors may, but we don't care
about *your* visitors.

What has this personal stuff got to do with anything? Have I insulted
you in some way?
 
H

houghi

Jonathan said:
Now generally a stud will be "styled" as a 2x4 @ 92" long just as a P
has a basic default style. A stud may be a 2x6 or a 2x8 like a joist or
rafter but the function is not the same just as a P may have larger text
like a H2 or H3 but their functions are different.

And many people in the world will say "2x4 what?" ;-)

houghi
 
D

dorayme

David Segall said:
Saving bother is a side effect.

Some side effect! It is a massive one imo and I did not mean it to sound
trivial.

When I mark up a paragraph in a paragraph element, I am thinking, this
is a paragraph, I will mark it up so because I trust that browsers of
every kind know what to do when they see the tags and they will make
sure that the audience will know it is a paragraph.

I am in this way relieved of a massive amount of work. Massive! I do not
need to study all the devices that are around, try to cater for devices
that will be invented etc. I trust that these tags are the signal for
*all* competent devices because their makers know what a paragraph is
and build in the necessary presentational mechanisms for it to be
received by an audience for what it is, a paragraph.

It seems I should be thinking fancier things according to what you and
Harlan are telling me. I am not in some stationary position and welcome
your thoughts a lot and continue to think about them.
 
J

Jonathan N. Little

dorayme said:
Yes, I would say same as you. I agree with you. 100%. But I was
discussing what I thought function|identity comes down to in real terms.
A sort of explanation of it in terms that are simple and transparent and
not left at an intuitive level.

I am not sure what you are asking. The HTML elements assign the specific
functionally of the content and there are generic elements that can be
customized. What would the sense be in <div class="paragraph">...? I
mean DIV works well for defining specialized sections

<div class="preamble">
<p>First paragraph in preamble...</p>
<p>Second paragraph in preamble...</p>
<p>Third paragraph in preamble...</p>
</div>
 
D

dorayme

"Jonathan N. Little said:
I am not sure what you are asking.

I was discussing some things. I was asking, I suppose, why a practical
website maker should use a P element instead of a styled DIV and I have
one answer I am inclined to give.

The HTML elements assign the specific
functionally of the content and there are generic elements that can be
customized. What would the sense be in <div class="paragraph">...? I
mean DIV works well for defining specialized sections
I have already said that it would not be a very sensible thing to do in
fact. But you and I would likely give different explanations about *why*
it is bad. I have previously outlined why I think it is bad and did so
again in a post to David just now.

For example, to add to what I might have said before, if I were to
confidently use a DIV style as a paragraph, I would need to control all
devices to ensure they have my styles turned on. I would need to take
more complicated actions for devices that were geared to read P tags but
not CSS2.1 styles so much... The idea I have about paragraph mark up is
that we website makers can take comfort in the fact that all devices
will understand them. And, as far as devices are concerned,
understanding is merely "being triggered by tags to deliver recognisable
presentations to humans".
 
H

Harlan Messinger

Ben said:
That doesn't follow at all!

Paragraphs are groupings of text on a page with some kind of spacing
between them, and people have some kind of a feel for how text should be
organized into them.

Paragraphs were a late development in writing. Do you think people
started spacing their text into chunks for no reason, and then started
thinking of those chunks as something called paragraphs--and then
decided to start using this chunking as a nifty way to structure their
text, as long as they were doing it anyway?

Writers of Thai and Japanese don't visibly separate their words. That
doesn't mean they don't conceive of their speech as being divided into
words. Conception of the structural divisions may or may not lead to the
use of visual cues. The structural divisions are there regardless. The
presentation is not the core nature of the divisions.
That's _all_ there is. That people have some kind of a feel for how to
use paragraphs does not imply there is any such thing as an "abstract
paragraph" somewhere behind the scenes which a "visual paragraph" is
merely a means of displaying.

Yes, it does imply that.
 
R

rf

Ed said:
Err, inches are metric?

What I meant was:

In North America a "stud" is 2 inches by 4 inches by 8 feet (unplaned
- actual finished dimensions are less). It never occurred to me that
overseas, where they use metric measures, that a stud would/might
differ in dimensions. So, my question was:

What does a wall stud in, say, the UK measure? Do they measure it in
inches? Millimeters?

In .au studs are normally 100mm by 50mm. Length is a multiple of 600mm,
usually 2.4metres.

However any chippy worth his sawdust will call them a lump of 4by2.
"Standard" ceiling height is usually 8 feet here, hence the stud
height. Although, over the last ten or 15 years that has tended to
have crept up to 9 feet or more.

2.4m. 2.7m.
 
J

Jukka K. Korpela

Harlan said:
Paragraphs were a late development in writing.

Originally, paragraphs were often separated just by a special character like
¶. Writing material was expensive, so you filled the entire available width
by letters, without leaving any unnecessary holes. Separation of paragraphs
was, however, important enough to justify the use of a separating character.
The word "paragraph" originally referred to the separating character.

The use of the character of course reflects the idea of dividing text into
parts, typically a few sentences long, and such division has a counterpart
in spoken communication - either in the division of conversation into
utterances of different people, or in the division of a speech or other
longer presentation into parts, typically separated by pauses and (in good
style at least) dealing with one topic.

Later, in more wasteful times, the ¶ character was written at the start of a
new line, so a paragraph break was indicated both by leaving a line shorter
than the available width and by the special mark. Then people got the idea
of omitting the ¶ character but leaving empty space. (A line break alone
isn't quite sufficient, especially when the last line of a paragraph happens
to be almost as long as the available width.) This is how first-line indents
came into use, and this is how paragraphs are still presented in literary
style.

The more modern and more wasteful method of leaving an empty line (with no
first-line indent) is questionable on several grounds. Far from _defining_
what a paragraph is, it's just the common default in HTML rendering,
reflecting the habits of typewriting and word processors - and contexts like
Usenet.
 
D

dorayme

Harlan Messinger said:
Paragraphs were a late development in writing.

Is this relevant to the webpage maker facing the *given fact* of a
paragraph right now in March 2009?
Do you think people
started spacing their text into chunks for no reason, and then started
thinking of those chunks as something called paragraphs--and then
decided to start using this chunking as a nifty way to structure their
text, as long as they were doing it anyway?
People started spacing some of their texts into chunks for good reasons.
They did not *then* decide to use this chunking for any further nifty
thing. The nifty invention was already invented when chunking was
invented. When the car was invented, driving it was not a further
invention.
Writers of Thai and Japanese don't visibly separate their words. That
doesn't mean they don't conceive of their speech as being divided into
words. Conception of the structural divisions may or may not lead to the
use of visual cues. The structural divisions are there regardless. The
presentation is not the core nature of the divisions.

Not sure of Thai but can't see *quite* in what respects you say this
about Japanese words (there are many compound *concepts* here). Kanji
uses Chinese iconic characters and these are separated, and there are
other additional things to make their writing useful. Anyway, this is
not a very transparent argument.

Perhaps how an English essay is marked up simply has to be dealt with by
translation facilities as best as possible (and vice versa). It does not
follow that there is some abstract object between languages because one
piece of work in one language can be translated into another language.

It may simply be that quick and efficient tools for some translational
tasks leave a lot to be desired. What is a chunk of writing in English
may even need special provisions (and I am talking more than pauses) in
talking.

If an audience is blind, the "whole thought" that is para in English
writing may really be better presented *not* as a chunk with pauses
either end. If you are really serious about making pages accessible to
blind people, you may need to reorganise quite differently. A paragraph
is a very visual concept and has some limitations translated into speech
or other languages.
Yes, it does imply that.

Then it faces the difficulties implicit in my last paragraphs. Much much
more transparent is to simply take the paragraph as a given. It is a
pattern and it is known to huge numbers of humans, there are often
awkward ways to make other patterns do the same kind of communicative
job for other languages and modalities (sight/sound/braille).

It is patterns all the way up and all the way down.
 
J

Jukka K. Korpela

dorayme said:
Is this relevant to the webpage maker facing the *given fact* of a
paragraph right now in March 2009?

It is. But do you know what the word "fact" means, for a fact? Consulting a
good dictionary, or especially a good manual of style might surprise you.
Specifically, paragraphs aren't facts.

Quite often, people who lack better arguments call some opinion of theirs a
fact just because it's not a fact at all and is strongly under dispute (or
just plain wrong). If you know that something is really a fact, there is no
need to call it a fact; you just know it, and if you need to tell others
about it, you just tell it and, if relevant, present the evidence or refer
to it. "This is a fact" is quite comparable to "This is not spam."
People started spacing some of their texts into chunks for good
reasons.

That's not correct. Spacing is a recent invention. Well, a few centuries
old, but that's recent when compared to thousands of years of written
language and probably hundreds of thousands of years of human language.

Division into chunks, in some sense, has always been an integral part of how
we use language, from the dawn of language - for all that we can now.
 

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